Redemption

The way we Neapolitans look at the photographs of Salvino Campos is rather special. Naples shares a common world with Brazil, which is painful but full of vitality at one and the same time – all oxymorons and contradictions: musicality and violence, sensuality and poverty, culture and degradation, beauty and destruction of the landscape. Wherever in the world these photographs have been taken, they are a mirror held up for us, or rather, they are like a magnifying glass through which we observe something that is geographically very far away from us but which, on the human level, is so close. In every photograph, the eye of Campos is that of a Brazilian. As we look at them this world we share reveals itself immediately, and it widens our horizons, opens us up as we become less introspective and makes us feel we are breathing together on this Earth. It suggests to us that Europe may not be finished if only it can imagine itself amongst others, if it stops erecting walls, if it does not close its borders. Certainly Naples is capable of doing this. The fact that this city has become a point of reference for a photographer like Campos is a joy for us; we feel that there is something fraternal in the way he sees us; his lens might almost belong to one of those great geniuses of Neapolitan photographers, if we didn’t grasp that inexpressible saudade which envelopes the heart of every Brazilian. The youngsters, male and female, who Campos photographs are especially striking: while he makes no concessions to their social condition, which is generally self-evidently harsh, the photographer captures their vitality and he projects them into our imagination, into a future realm which is yet to be discovered but which is full of possibilities, if only we work to create them. Thus, photography shows how it is able to stimulate, to work as a lever upon the way we see things so that seeing may turn into action.