This story originally appeared on i-D Italy.
Born in the north of England, the former London-based photographer Brett Lloyd now spends most of his time in Naples. Like many before him, he has long been enchanted by Italy’s vibrant port city. The result of this love affair? Napoli, Napoli, Napoli – five years of work immortalising his adopted home presented in a stunning photo book. Published by Mörel and designed by the Milanese studio Macs lotti, of the book’s repetitious title, the photographer explains that the city is simply “too intense to be represented in just one word”.
Brett Lloyd’s love for Naples was born serendipitously over a decade ago, when he found himself stuck there, after missing the last train for the Amalfi Coast. It was then that, as he details in a statement accompanying the book’s release, he “discovered the city at night for the first time; a night spent wandering its winding roads that bound on forever”. In 2014, he published Scugnizzi, a book celebrating the playful spirit of the city in full saturated colour.
Napoli Napoli Napoli takes a different approach. 135 black-and-white photographs taken over five consecutive summers – from 2018 to today – piece together the story of an idealised day in Naples. It’s an excursion from sunrise to sunset that “ponders classicism, the cathartic power of the sea and the unique influence of the ancient landscape… the ocean, the volcano, the Roman architecture, the views and all the absurdity of the city”.
The images capture details of the place’s pulsating beauty; beauty manifested through the portraits of those who love and live in the city, “in continuity with the social rhythms that pass through childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old-age,” Lloyd explains in the statement, noting the specificity and slowness of the project. “The opposite of what often happens in the fashion world — one made by very tight deadlines.”
In Napoli, Napoli, Napoli, Lloyd presents a neorealist aesthetic brought about by empty and majestic landscapes, melancholic close-ups, characters who seem to possess an almost sacred aura and, perhaps most importantly, as the photographer notes, “the cathartic power of the sea”. For the book’s accompanying exhibition (shown at Paris Photo and coming soon to London) he has selected 24 photos — one for every hour of a day — exploring the vast spectrum of sensations that time spent on the Naples seafront can provide. These document an intimate, hidden side of the city; portraits of people who trust Lloyd and give him what is usually hidden from the eyes of tourists. Here, the sacred crosses over with the profane; the reality and dreamscape of Naples overlap in an ethereal space of eternal summer.
‘Napoli, Napoli, Napoli’ is out now and will be exhibited at London’s Donlon Books on 30 November.
Credits
Images courtesy of Brett Lloyd and Mörel Books.