Ilse Fusková

Photographer, artist, reporter and urban flâneuse Ilse Fusková Kornreich (b. Buenos Aires, 1929) -known for her pseudonym Felka under which she signed her photographs from the 50s-, studied journalism and worked as a flight attendant. During those years, she collaborates with magazines like El Hogar, Chicas, Histonium, Mundo Argentino, Para Ti and Lyra as a reporter and film commentator. This cheerful graphic reporter and urban flâneuse reflects through her peculiar lens the city of Buenos Aires, as well as her experience of modernity, between 1953 and 1958. She focuses on the richness of her cultural context and on those who are left aside in the modernizing process. Along her restless and smart wanderings, Fusková poetically captures simple characters, which she exalts, as well as outstanding intellectuals and artists, whom she humanizes. Modernity is the moment where the public and private spheres are shaped, establishing the domestic space as the mandatory feminine territory. Therefore, women that walk around the city, not for economic needs, but rather for the pleasure of experimenting the freedom of walking, observing and stimulating their imagination and creative sense are atypical. That action means a huge step for women on their affirmation as autonomous subjects, as human beings with creative capabilities of their own. An artistic medium born during modernity, photography matches with and promotes these conquests. This practice offers creative and economic independence to the New Woman: all of those modern young ladies that want to live their lives according to their wishes and aspirations. After a decade of domestic retreat, Ilse Fusková joins the Feminine Liberation Movement towards the end of the 70s.