THE ITALIAN SOUTH by Tim O’Leary A rare visual representation of the Italian South in the early years of the new millenium. A passionate odyssey beyond the scope of conventional travel literature. The Italian South is an interpretation of a much-maligned and misunderstood region not previously looked at as a geographical entity, in a short time-frame, by a serious photographic work. Prior to the journeys involved in making this book, I am not aware of having met an Italian southerner: at the same time, non-Italians and Italians from north and central Italy, in whatever corner of the world, were frequently ready to look down their noses at such a person, even if, as was almost always the case, they had never travelled to the South at all. There was talk of squalid, chaotic towns (especially Naples), countryside full of terroni (‘people of the dirt’) and, everywhere, notions of dubious morality and threats to personal safety. Having often visited Italy between Rome and the Alps, the final spur to explore the South for myself came, like many before me, from reading Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, which, when originally published in 1945, was the first work to alert the world to the continued plight of Southern Italy. If, as a son of the Irish diaspora myself, that appealed to my sense of being an outsider, Francesco Rosi’s 1979 film of the book later gave me a passion for the barren landscape of central Basilicata where the film was made (part of the Mediterranean ‘Badlands’ engagingly described by Grove and Rackham in their ecological history). It isn’t always easy to say what releases the power to create, or what, in a given moment, urged the making of a particular photograph but the light on this landscape, and on the people and towns in and around it, is the core inspiration for the following images. Other influences, amongst many, include the works of Clifton, Parks, Robb, Savinio, Sciascia, Svevo and Vailland; the travels of Ramage, Gissing and Douglas (discussed below); the histories by Boardman, Ginsborg, Norwich and Potter; the photography of Berengo Gardin, Giacomelli and Jodice; and the well-nigh ubiquitously satisfying food and wine described widely (for example in Fort, Helstosky, Pradelli and Simeti). The situation in the South has improved markedly since Levi’s book was published, yet the idea of it being ‘different’, ‘separate’, ‘other’, often in a pejorative sense, still lingers. Regarding ‘the thorny question of the relation between the representations of southern Italy and the reality behind them.’ Nelson Moe asked recently ‘ Isn’t there something to these representations… hasn’t the south been different - impoverished, crime-ridden, downtrodden - but also somehow more human and authentic? Of course… the south is different - but not that different - not wholly ‘other’, not ‘Africa’ ’. As my own concept of the South developed from the catalyst of Levi, difference became not only apparent but vital. Much socio-cultural work in recent years has emphasised the similarities between southern regions and those further north claiming ‘Italian’ interconnectedness. Under the westernized surface, however, there seem to be overriding differences of character, spirit and outlook marking the south as a group of regions, each proud and stubborn in equal measure but always with a social integrity that holds firm through a feeble relationship with central government, unemployment and the uninvited symbiosis with organised crime. In his recent history of Southern Italy, Tommaso Astarita tells how the South moved from being the cradle of early civilisation in the western Mediterranean; how medieval Palermo was one of Europe’s wealthiest and most splendid cities; and how Naples was one of Europe’s most influential centres between the 15th and 19th centuries. He observes that it is ‘the contradiction between the centrality of the Italian South to European life and culture on the one hand, and the many elements of its distance from what Europeans have long regarded as modern (in economic, social, political and spiritual terms) on the other - that makes natives and visitors ambivalent in their feelings about the region. In a sense,‘Naples and the South have always been both deeply of Europe and, at the same time, outside of it ’. Astarita goes on to reflect on ‘the contradictory images of Naples given in the US press, for example, a spate of gang killings and a great exhibition of Caravaggio’s late works’ but, for me, this rather misses the point because, for the greater part of the population, these events aren’t the contradiction implied but merely brackets of social extreme. People may not remain unaware or unmoved by such events but they are uninvolved: the path of their lives leads elsewhere. It was mainly in the context of these lives that I developed my conception of what is variously described as the ‘Southern Question’, ‘the Mezzogiorno’, ‘Meridianilismo’, ‘the Indies over there’ or ‘a liminal space between Europe, Africa and the Orient’. The Southern Italy I travelled in for nine months in the early years of the 21st century is, however, largely that defined by Ginsborg (Abbruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Puglia, Sardinia and Sicily ). The journeys were made to some extent in the footsteps of the great travellers Ramage, Gissing and Douglas. Ramage called his book ‘The Nooks and Byways of Italy’ and Gissing later wrote more about the byways than the highways of Magna Graecia. We, like Gissing, ‘fought shy of the average tourist’ (with the obvious exceptions of where holidaying Italians were deliberately sought out) and mostly did not encounter English-speaking, let alone English tourists. As has been observed of Gissing, I hope there is here both fairness and respect, as well as candidness and criticism. The South has always been a melting pot of cultures. Two and a half thousand years of invasions and occupations, kingdoms and empires have produced striking miscegenation still evident today (e.g. red hair and/or blue eyes with dark skin in those of Norman and Albanian descent). If the late-19th and early 20th centuries were times of substantial net emigration from the South, it now attracts incomers from Africa, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The South is today part of a modern consumer economy but, as Astarita has summarised , ‘most economic indicators remain lower than for those of northern Italy and unemployment, especially among the young, is a particular concern. Southern levels of consumption, production and income are still about three-fifths of the national averages… Economists have described the southern situation as modernisation without development, in that standards of living are more advanced than either productive forces or civic institutions. A large underground economy and a substantial infusion of government subsidies in the form of welfare payments (a major component of political patronage) are troubling elements of southern prosperity. But it remains noteworthy that the great majority of contemporary southerners live in material comfort that would amaze their grandparents’. From the start and in the end, this is a photographic composition of a complex and endearing region. It is the result of journeys undertaken at all times with my wife and children - Melanie, Luke and Imogen - whose company and patience lie behind the making of many of these images. Wherever we were in the south, with friends in a cosmopolitan town or in some remote and supposedly dangerous place, the family proved the best passport a man could have. In a recent talk about his latest book, Colin Thubron observed that, if the academic says ‘this is how it is’, then the travel writer says ‘this is how it seemed to me’. Perhaps, as a photographer, I am, therefore, saying ‘this is what I chose to see, so it can seem like something to you’. This digital presentation comprises photographs shot originally on what used to be called conventional 35mm black-and-white film stock, using manual cameras, fitted usually with wide-angle lenses. Out of thousands of photographs, 350 were chosen for high-resolution scanning and edited down to the sequence of 189 making up this book. Archival prints have been made from many of the negatives, several of them appearing in the exhibitions ‘Mythical Land’ (2002) and ‘Rite of Cancer’ (2004). March 2007
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