After returning from years of war coverage, Peter van Agtmael tries to piece together the memory, identity, race, class, and family, in a landscape which has become as surreal as the war he left behind.
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Mimmo Jodice
Photographer
Mimmo Jodice is born in Naples where he lives and works. His name is well known in the history of contemporary photography.
When he was very young, he dedicated himself to painting and drawing and was passionately interested in arts, classical music and jazz.
In the early 1960’s he discovered photography as a new means of expression. He began to experiment with different materials, abstract forms and all linguistic and technical aspects of photography.
During the 1970’s he was in contact with the most important avant-garde artists, who worked and exposed in Naples: Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Kounelis, De Dominicis, Paolini, Sol Lewitt, Kosuth, and many others.
He was deeply involved with these new artistic movements and he devoted himself more and more to conceptual and creative photography. But it was also a period of social urgency to which Jodice responded with passionate engagement.
In 1969 he began teaching photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, where he taught until 1994.
His first solo exhibition was held at the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino in 1968 and in 1970 his work Dentro Cartelle Ermetiche was exhibited in Milan at the Galleria il Diaframma, with text by Cesare Zavattini. In 1980 he started to develop a new perspective in which the human figure was no longer the protagonist, concentrating on a new empty, menacing, urban space, laden with metaphysical memories. His book Vedute di Napoli marks a change in his language: his photographs would be more and more detached from reality, immersed in a visionary and silent dimension.
In 1981 he took part at the exhibition Expression of Human Condition with Diana Arbus, Larry Clark, Lisette Model, and William Klein at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
In the following years, parallel threads ran through Jodice’s work: one with a surreal and uneasy vision of urban landscapes and the other with an attention towards the imprints of the past on the present and, at the same time, a research of his roots and the myths of the Mediterranean.
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