by Giovanni Ruggiero
We imagine fireworks dancing in the sky, competing with the stars. They rise high, then let themselves go, surrendering, and finally dying in the night, like Narcissus in the lake where he once saw his reflection.
These are languid dancers—not wild, frenzied spirits unleashing a mad, frantic dance—like the fireworks that Mario Amura has been photographing for fourteen years beneath the sky of Naples, in front of Vesuvius. In the twenty minutes following the stroke of midnight on December 31, it is as if a propitiatory dance takes place. Everything explodes into a luminous sarabande. And when this happens, since 2010 the photographer has been there, on Mount Fàito overlooking the volcano—a distant black silhouette—and on the concrete expanse of the Vesuvius towns. Soon, everything will turn into a radiant, dazzling, fiery magma. Accompanying Mario Amura are some lifelong friends engaged in an open, collective work, still in progress, following his instructions. The photographer directs their shots while his friends comply. Long exposure times and the movement imparted to the camera—sometimes swaying, sometimes oscillating, sometimes making abrupt shifts, sometimes gently rocking—are key. Thus, the lights of the fireworks, distinct against the dark sky, blend together and merge, evoking an apocalypse, as it might be if Vesuvius were to erupt and rebel. It is called “Napoli Explosion” (or “NapEx”), this “collective reportage” that transcends the banality of mere representation. Just like a true reportage, it starts from reality, but soon transforms it. “NapEx” is the fantastic and magical documentation of a real event. This endless expanse of concrete, however, is made up of people with feelings, fears, desires, and aspirations. One must consider that behind every light, big or small, and behind every flash, there is a person who, through these fireworks, expresses and exorcises his fear of the dreaded yet beloved volcano known to Neapolitans as ‘A Muntagna. “While Vesuvius remains silent,” says Amura, “the city unleashes itself in a propitiatory and even superstitious rite to ward off an eruption. Alberto Saporito, from Eduardo’s ‘Voci di dentro,’ plays the elderly Zi’ Nicola who, having abandoned words, expresses himself solely by launching firecrackers. In the way they decide to fire cannons and fireworks, I seem to recognize the motions of hope, fear, joy, and anger of the people.” This grand work, which for Mario Amura represents a new fusion of his identity as an artist and photographer, is offered in large images (1.60 x 2.40 m) mounted on lightboxes that illuminate them. It was presented at the Capodimonte Museum, in the dim light of the “Cellaio” the hall that served as the New Year’s Eve venue. “Napoli Explosion,” Sylvain Bellenger wrote for the occasion, “is a work in which photography, painting, and pyrotechnic art converge into one single event. The main theme is not Vesuvius, which appears as a silent shadow, but the city overwhelmed by fireworks capable of transforming fear into joy. What Amura has aimed to capture over time is the relationship between photography and painting. The link between photography and light has become the central theme of his work. One must gaze at these images for a long time, immerse oneself in them.” Two works by Mario Amura will remain in Naples, the city/the theater of his fireworks. “NapEx 223181,” featuring an imposing Vesuvius that seems to float in incandescent magma, published in these pages, has become part of the collection of the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte. Another work, meanwhile, is part of the heritage of the Pio Monte della Misericordia. It will be exhibited in the seventeenth-century palace in the historic center, which, among other masterpieces, houses Caravaggio’s grand canvas of the Seven Works of Mercy.
In “NapEx” converge the two paths that, coming together, led Mario Amura to photography. First of all, Henri Cartier-Bresson: he encountered him as a young man, and then cinema—as happened to the same French master who was Jean Renoir’s assistant. “I understood from his photographs,” says Amura, “how powerful a single shot could be, and how evocative each image is. The beauty of photography, compared to other expressive forms, is that it allows you to narrate what is within you through something happening outside of you.” Mario Amura, essentially just over twenty, wanted to “learn to see.” Before Cartier-Bresson, it was as if he had never truly seen what was before him. “I used to observe everything with emotional detachment,” he says, “while he was able to tell the story of a life flowing before my eyes that I had never known how to grasp. Photographing enhances the visual perception of emotions and marks the point of coincidence between what happens outside and what you feel inside.” This lesson is evident in all his early images collected in the volume “Fotografie 1995–1999.” “Mario Amura,” writes Serenella Iovino in the afterword, “moves among images with curiosity and discretion. Through images, he narrates his research, his way of seeing, his boundaries. Amura observes, and he is never ‘visionary’ or ‘metaphysical.’ He moves among things without lingering, allowing them to tell their story without emphasis, without aesthetic concessions to the fragment. His photos are not visual notebooks, but images detached from an individual biographical path. They are marks of a deeper, impersonal, collective experience—the very same that we find in Ernesto De Martino’s ‘Sud e magia.’ Of the South,” she adds, “he is interested in the underground and pagan phenomena, those that settle and crystallize in the ‘Christian-popular’ collective memory: a neorealism with a Pasolini lineage.” His reportages around the world (Wuyuan, London, New Delhi, Istanbul, Kiev, New York are some of his destinations) have been realized with a humble eye. The humility of his gaze lies in entering the lives of others without presumption, without disturbing the equilibrium of any existence. In these lives, Mario Amura treads lightly. For example, consider how respectful the images of “Sleepers” are, portraying the sleep-deprived poor of New Delhi. “Photo reportage,” he says, “is the only form of photography that interests me. Compared to photography that reconstructs, sets up, or redraws spaces and situations, I prefer one that draws completely from reality.” This humility with which he has carried out his many reportages—some say his ability to become invisible while photographing, giving the photographed world the chance to express itself—Mario Amura learned from cinema. After discovering Bresson, and as Bresson did, he knocked on the doors of cinema. He attended courses at the Centro Sperimentale di Fotografia, particularly the classes of Peppino Rotunno. The great director of photography used to start the day with his students by reading excerpts from novels, then imagining how to stage them in the most effective way. “This exercise of translating written pages into filmed images,” the photographer explains, “made me understand that the humility of the gaze lies in being able to adapt one’s eye to the story to be told, to the reality to be documented. Rotunno taught me that the director of photography submits his self to the altar of the story to be told.
Ultimately, I learned to do this work in cinema to learn to see with eyes different from my own.” In 2003, with the short film “Racconto di Guerra,” Mario Amura won the David di Donatello and later provided the cinematography for many directors such as Luca Guadagnino, Paolo Sorrentino, Vincenzo Marra, Sabina Guzzanti, and Paolo Genovese. Photography/reportage and cinema/movement: two approaches that have never drifted apart over the years; in one way or another, they have confronted each other, echoing one another. “NapEx” is a symphony of movements frozen in time. Every single work is a frame of energy fixed in space. Just as cinematic movement and photographic stillness converge in the “StopEmotion” project. “With the advent of digital,” says Amura, “I began experimenting with narrative paths using streams of photographs taken in sequence. With this, I realized live performances in which I display the images in tune with the rhythm of the music that serves as the emotional backdrop.” Everything is movement. The images dance, just as in the sarabande of fireworks around the totemic mountain.
