Erased – Eduardo Castaldo

In the heart of Naples, a house—the cultural space Tribunali 138, founded by photographer Luciano Ferrara—welcomes home photojournalist Eduardo Castaldo, who displays his photographs in a personal exhibition for the first time in his native city. Born in 1977, Castaldo’s images already approach the iconic, presenting us with crucial events of our recent history, especially in the areas of the Middle East and Ukraine. Castaldo’s images have been used worldwide by the media, winning several international prizes—the Word Press Photo Award in 2012 amongst them.

The choice of a domestic environment as gallery is striking. Protected both by the homey and the artistic context, the images get back their raw communicative role, enforced by an intimate one-to-one approach between the photographs and the observer. For the photographer himself, it’s a process of self-revelation, signaling the beginning of an investigation that comes from both the professional and personal urge to give a powerful answer to the meaning of photographic information today: especially in assuming the responsibility that building independent political thought contributes.

The recently opened path invites us to contemplate new chapters of this delicate and controversial field, and it is not a coincidence that the project was born from a conversation between two photographers from Naples: Castaldo and the curator of the exhibition, Peppe Tortora.

“Erased reflects the author’s need to get some distance from his own pictures, rifling their sense by rewriting it. Many of Castaldo’s pictures narrate recent years in the Middle East—the conflicts and promises of freedom—pictures full of symbolism and simulacra of reality. The author is aware of this, and that’s the reason why he feels the need to propose them again to the public and to himself, drained from their symbolic burden and outside of traditional spaces. Erased is not only an artistic event: in these pictures we find Egypt, the 2011 revolution and the months that followed, symbols of hope, dreams and heroism. All this has since been swept away by a military coup. Erased. Castaldo’s pictures, bound and gagged like the people and the dreams they represent, come with their silence to narrate the dramatic situation of a population. It’s by passing through an artistic process that the photographs get back their documentary identity and give back to journalism the right to the magic.”

— Peppe Tortora

Erased is on view through April 19th, 2015.
 
Tribunali 138 is located at via Tribunali 138, Naples.