City of Secrets: Photographs of Naples

Rating:
Summary: City of Secrets: Photographs of the PEOPLE of Naples
Review: This is not a book for people looking for architectural or landscape photographs of Naples; the pictures focus solely on the people (mostly female children) of this ancient Italian city.

The photographs in this book are not technically brilliant, even by standards of the time, yet the dark shadows are rich with secret meaning: a woman in a doorway is seen only as a skirt and arms holding an infant, for example. The essay does a dutiful job of answering questions about why the photographs were taken in the loose fashion that some of them were, and why they are mostly focused on girls, but is neither boring nor compelling.

However, the real reason to get this book is to get a sense of the living, breathing city, both old and young, in its extremes of glamour and squalor, that makes you both wish you could go see that time and place and hope that it has vanished.