Gomorrah Girl by Valerio Spada | en

Valerio Spada’s work on Naples is almost a documentary about adolescence, choices and chances in a land of Camorrah (the name of the Mafia in Naples).

 

On March 27th, 2004, Annalisa Durante, at the age of 14, was killed in front of her father’s store in Forcella, a Naples area under the Giuliano clan’s egemony. Annalisa was caught in a crossfire between three young members of the Camorrah.

 

This photographic journey starts from Annalisa's father, Giovanni Durante, who still works in the same store in Forcella. Since that day he brings breakfast with milk at 9 every morning to his daughter's grave. There is a magnificent strength in Giovanni Durante's will to stay in Forcella, trying to right the wrongs of one of the most dangerous areas in Naples. A similar determination can be found in the teachers at the Liceo Elsa Morante, in the Scampia neighborhood, in their daily effort to educate and keep the girls of Scampia off the streets and from a destiny that seems to have been written long before these girls were born. Generations of wrong choices and mistakes that have ripped families and whole communities in this region apart.  

 

In this book there are portraits of girls whose destinies can still change if not the destiny of the area in which they are growing up. Annalisa was one of them. She kept a diary, in which she wrote that Naples was becoming too dangerous to live in and how she was dreaming to escape, to live far away from Forcella. 

In general, "Gomorrah Girl" shows the problems of becoming a woman in a dangerous, crime ridden area. Adolescence is almost denied, at 9 they dance, move and make themselves up as tv personalities and dream to become one of them. At 13 or 14, very often, they become mothers, skipping the adolescence which is lived fully everywhere else in Italy.

 

ISBN 978-2-9536712-0-9

Cross Editions 2011 (edition of 500 copies)

Softcover, offset, custom side-stapled red.

Design by – SYB – Sybren Kuiper

80 pages: 40 + 40

29.5 x 20 cm

Text: English