Jean-Marc Caimi and Valentina Piccinni’s projects focus both on documentary and more personal, intimate photography. This series is an account of some of the oldest neighborhoods of Naples known as the home of the most violent mafia gangs: Forcella, Quartieri Spagnoli and Sanità, where people follow unique and unwritten laws, behaviors and traditions and maintain a timeless identity, frozen in a undefined era somewhere between the end of the war and the Eighties. Places where poverty is the queen and Camorra the king.
Caimi and Piccinni explain their approaches “We rented a small flat and started living in Forcella. Getting acquainted with people, with the rhythm of the neighborhood, with the communication codes and customs. We started to become friends with many locals, who were opening their homes and their lives to us. We took photos, always trying to be very close and intimate with our subjects. We used small and unobtrusive point-and-shoot film cameras. We setup a darkroom in the bathroom of our little place, developing films at night after whole days of shooting. We were soaked in this human primordial soup, contradictory, dangerous, strong, beautiful and repulsive at the same time. A microcosm impossible to find anywhere else. We felt that Naples was a world apart and for that reason we felt something that was long missing: freedom.”
Forcella (2015) published by Witty Kiwi Books.