Brett Lloyd: Napoli Napoli Napoli

Napoli Napoli Napoli by Brett Lloyd is a love letter to the southern Italian city.Having first visited Naples in 2010, Lloyd fell immediately in love with its people and coastline. Conceived over four consecutive summers, Lloyd charts a day in Neapolitan life: taking daily trips from Santa Lucia right through to Marechiara, he documents local life down by the water. Shooting with his 1950s Rolleiflex, the book starts out early in the morning at sea capturing the fishermen who welcome the day with their fresh catch just as their ancestors have done for generations. This is a city where the past - whether it's the splendours of empire or the lure of ancient mythology - is never far away. They're quickly followed by the morning's first bathers as they head towards their cherished rocks facing Mount Vesuvius. Lloyd shoots the Neapolitan youth - its Scugnizzi, its love couples, its Femminielli, take centre-stage, enjoying the full heat of the sun, diving off the ruins of Palazzo degli Spiriti, an ancient Roman palace, fighting, flirting, eating, posing, or simply perfecting their tan. Finally, in the afternoon a sense of calm pervades the images: with the long shadows reclaiming their spots along the shoreline, Lloyds intimate portraits of the local youth evoke the noble faces of Gemito and Von Gloeden, faces fresh with adolescence. In Brett Lloyd's photographs, there is the trace of the charmed conditions in which they were made. A photographer who is in love with a city. His camera does not just hold a mirror to its beauty; it asks its subjects to see themselves as participating in a process where beauty is continuous with social rhythms that span childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. A process that begins but never ends in Naples.