Mimmo Jodice

Since the 1960s Mimmo Jodice has used photography both to analyze reality and as an instrument of introspective investigation. His images document the impassioned interaction of the photographer’s eye with the world.
Jodice first began exploring through photography the cultural and social fabric of Naples, his native city, and his lens participated in the new energies of the avant-garde art movements that took place there. In the 1970s he experimented with new technical languages and the material nature of the photographic subject, at the same time utilizing photography as a tool of social engagement.
“When it is freely expressed,” Jodice has noted, “my work runs on two parallel tracks: denunciation, where I always see myself aligned on the side of the underdog; and creative photography, where my dissent is expressed through the surreal, the metaphysical, silence.”
Beginning in the artist’s work from the 1980s, the human figure is no longer physically present. Instead, Jodice focuses on the landscape, understood as the landscape of nature, of civilization, of memory, and of dream.
The images that make up La città invisibile (The Invisible City), 1990, are a series of views of Neapolitan districts and neighboring towns, where the frenetic action of the city seems to come to a halt amid the evidence of contemporary civilization. The industrial buildings photographed become metaphysical landscapes, in which long shadows measure silence. The places are interpreted as the ends of the earth, where reality literally loses its habitual consistency. The oneiric dimension is accentuated by the spacious skies that scan the geometry of the compositions and by the almost constant presence of the horizon line.

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