Detta Innominata is the name of the street where Aniello Barone was born and now lives, in the industrial district of San Giovanni a Teduccio in the eastern suburbs of Naples. His latest work confirms the photographer’s engagement with subcultures, the environment, and social marginalization – a constant feature in his personal odyssey. Barone accompanies this with an exploration of his native land, conducted through unexpected associations, even at times unintended combinations, in which it is always possible to detect the heartbeat of the collective life of all great metropolises. Barone’s gaze is sensitive, unflinching, incisive and observant; his style recalls a highly contemporary black and white reportage, tunnelling into reality with dense shadows and streaks of light.

The selection of thirty large format digital black and white prints is a meditation on post-industrial and post-atomic society, on the precariousness of existence and the potential unplugged visual truths, whereby Naples foreshadows a future reality. Caught in the crossfire of civil instability, its gang wars and environmental emergency, the city is the sensor that warns us of a boundary line beyond which a discomfiting vista unfolds, one that could repeat itself across the metropolises of developed societies. In this way Naples becomes an urban frontier, someplace between a decadent European capital and contemporary metropolis.

Aniello Barone’s Naples is a personal vision of a marginalized geographical space, an ex-periphery, a non-logos; a place that today is at the centre of a project of transformation and urban renewal. Far from seeing his city as the victim of a permanent emergency, Barone is unconventional in his constant pursuit of the life that pulsates in this urban universe where signs of a transient humanity can always be found.

As he himself explains: “I tried to extrapolate unique elements from the depths of the periphery to speak in reality of an entire city, of a Naples that nods neither at folklore nor urban violence; I wanted to emphasize the city’s membership of a larger global scenario. These images can be read as an allegory, as signals pointing to an “other” reality, to history but also to the present day…”

This project was made possible by the Councillorship for the Heritage of the City of Naples, the District of San Giovanni a Teduccio, the Campania Region, and all the people in the neighbourhood who were willing to be photographed by Barone.