Vedute di Napoli, Opera 29

Mimmo Jodice’s Naples is a city in black and white, silent, dense and enigmatic. The colours and din have dissolved before the lens and are no longer part of it. The Neapolitan photographer’s early work was instead characterized by a markedly social approach, investigating corners of the city with the eye of a contemporary ethnologist. The book Vedute di Napoli (1980), from which the print on display is taken, marked the end of Jodice’s “social period” and the start of a new exploration of reality in which the human figure gives way to the examination of urban space and the traces of life it bears. The photographer presents his city, its neighbourhoods and backstreets in images constituting a visionary interpretation of reality, a “metaphysics of everyday life”. The Neapolitan repertoire is a documentary of surrealistic images to be found in day-today life in the crumbling walls, the fleeting glimpse of a bus or, as in this photo, the ghostly apparition of a car. (Transl. by Paul Metcalfe per Scriptum, Roma)