Donna Ferrato’s HOLY TALK
Destiny is having her day, finally.
From an act of confluence between man and Mother Nature, I was asked to give The VII Foundation Keynote at Arles. Since I haven’t been for 44 years, I am grateful for this chance to engage with an ardent visual community, to speak my truth without fear of reprisal.
I want to talk about the existential experience for women living in the center of a cockstorm. I will show how subversive photography can be, and expose the root of the thing that is killing women, children even men faster than society can sustain itself.
Before, when I saw a woman brutalized before my eyes, I stopped it. Then, I photographed it.
Every story is the real deal. No actors. My work comes from basic instinct and explores the inhumanity of the human condition under the control of men with too much power.
Philip Jones Griffiths, the anti-war photographer and my soul partner, once said if my photographs make editors uncomfortable, I’ve done my job.
When things go wrong, I go inside. I live inside the extremes of other people’s lives. My camera is the way in.
Donna Ferrato, 2026
