This well-known photo by German photographer Wilhelm Von Gloeden (1856-1931) is not of a young Sicilian girl, but of a boy dressed as a Sicilian girl. It’s one example of more than 3000 photos Von Gloeden took in Sicily from the 1890s through to his death in 1931. Von Gloeden lived and worked in Taormina for most of his adult life, photographing landscapes and pastoral portraits, documenting events such as the 1908 earthquake in Messina, and creating studies of nude Sicilian boys posed in various scenes that recall Greek and Roman antiquity. Needless to say, his photos are quite controversial, and in 1933, Mussolini’s Fascist police confiscated and destroyed more than 2000 of Von Gloeden’s prints, citing them as pornographic.
