Street Life in Naples

Here is a short photographic essay on street photography in Naples, with thoughts on the genre as a whole.

I feel a bit diffident about taking candid photographs of strangers – I talked about this before in my post on Street Photography. There are a few ways around this – apart from sticking exclusively to landscapes, of course.

One is to include people as anonymous distant or abstract objects in a composition.

Another is to choose occasions when implied consent may reasonably be assumed – such as street performers or people taking part in historical pageants. People doing both are even better, although it seems only fair to toss a euro in the hat if you take their photographs.

If in doubt you can always ask – pointing at the camera and raising your eyebrows will get the point across fairly well. People in professional environments – shopkeepers or craftsmen – often respond positively.

And it is really hard to define, but there are certain places when you just feel that people are less self-conscious, more exuberant and outgoing, and less likely to be bothered by the presence of a camera. Such a place is Naples.

These things are admittedly subjective and I am quite likely to be projecting my own responses to the city onto others, but both times we have visited Naples I have taken a great many pictures of people and I’ve never felt that my doing so was unwelcome.

A lot of the time, the attraction of photographing people just going about their daily lives is that it helps you capture a sense of what it is like living there. Of course there is plenty of scope for being selective – if you just chose happy people, you could make a city seem like a wonderful place to live, and if you just chose down-and-outs, it could seem horrible. You see this sort of tendentious selection quite a lot in journalism. I’m not saying that it is necessarily dishonest, but if you are illustrating a story that is making a particular point, then obviously your choice of illustrations will be consistent with that.

But I am not a journalist, and I don’t really have any agenda. So for me the point is to try and illustrate the impression a place makes on me, as honestly as possible. Yes, that means I am going to be selective, but with the the best of motives. So for Naples I try and take pictures of happy people, because that how Naples makes me feel. Then again, people in Naples really do look happier.

Some of the best street photographs, for me, are those that seem to tell a story. In the picture below, is the girl on the shore dreaming that one day it will be her turn to be drinking champagne on a superyacht?

And in some cases the attraction of the photograph is just the sheer oddness of it – what on earth is going on here?