It’s just a little graffito: “THIS IS THEE LIFE. DO YOU REALLY WONT?” But whoever wrestled it with crumbling English and a philosophical mood – it’s one of the many details that make a visual stroll through Giovanni Cocco’s “Naples” worthwhile. The lettering can be seen in a street scene on Procida, the smallest island in the metropolitan gulf. Next to it, a teenager with mirrored sunglasses cycles through a life from which viewers can only speculate whether he wants it that way or not. And in the other photographs in the illustrated book, too, the concrete and the implied are cleverly balanced.
In the Sanità district, panes of glass reflect nested rows of houses, traffic and passers-by. A girl poses in an opulent communion dress like a queen in front of the facades of the old town. A huge soap bubble wafts through the air on the cloud-covered promenade – you can literally feel that it is about to burst.
Cocco alternates between sublime vantage points and everyday perspectives. Sometimes he draws attention to the abstract, often morbid beauty of the architecture from two millennia, sometimes to the breathtaking coastal landscape. And then again the inevitable washing lines flapping in the wind, a fish stall, the Motorini in the alleys, a Maradona portrait.
A fish stall: cliché and yet an integral part of Naples.
(Photo: Giovanni Cocco/Mare)
All of this has long been a cliché, but it is an inseparable part of Naples. And the photographer, born in Abruzzo in 1973 and, as a Roman by choice, only a regular visitor to the city, does the only right thing: by not avoiding these motifs, but showing them as he sees them.
Cocco has already made photo series about his disabled sister, about burlesque dancers and migrants on Europe’s borders. This time, too, he focuses his camera intensely on life. Again and again you look at people who are absorbed in their work, whether at the pizza oven, at the desk or in a porter’s lodge. Cocco’s Neapolitans think, shop, party and swim, they stroll and run, they toil, play and sleep, they kiss and push prams.
“The beauty of the city also lies in the creativity of its residents, who take their liberties everywhere,” says the book accompanying this picture, which shows bathers at Castel dell’Ovo.
(Photo: Giovanni Cocco/Mare)
A nun near the convent of Suore Figlie della Carità in the Chiaia neighborhood.
(Photo: Giovanni Cocco/Mare)
What remains invisible is how abruptly the tangle and chaos of the Camorra metropolis can turn violent – these Neapolitan abysses are mentioned instead in the accompanying essay by Zora del Buono, co-founder of the publishing house Mare.
Apart from the introduction, the photographs in the main part are allowed to stand on their own, unexplained, unlocated. What you see exactly in each case can only be read in brief at the end of the volume. This is how something pleasant is achieved: anyone who knows Naples can first undisturbedly question their own memory while leafing through it, turn the viewing into a silent guessing game, and also discover something new. And those who have yet to see the city with their own eyes will want to hand the book a foretaste of the fantastic variety that awaits there.
Naples is the most beautiful seen from the sea, writes Zora del Buono rightly. Here is a view of the Vomero district.
(Photo: Giovanni Cocco/Mare)
Giovanni Cocco: Naples. With texts by Zora del Buono. Mare-Verlag, Hamburg 2022. 132 pages, 58 euros.