Carmine Covino, born (1989) and based in the magical Naples, is a photographer immersed in the subculture of the fabric of the city's old town. He has always photographed in analog and black and white, mostly in 35mm with leica and SLR, run numerous darkrooms of squats and, through all this, he has exuded the most authentic, hidden and silent essence of the city. He teaches darkroom techniques, has published in several fanzines and collective books by independent Italian publishers, and has exhibited since 2014 between Naples, Zurich and Marseille, the latter another fundamental city to his artistic growth.

Hello Carmine, and thank you for inviting me to your home and cooking an excellent baked cod with potatoes. It is a thetic moment: the first interview I've done with you in decades of friendship that we share. Let's start right away: Your photographs are marked by the two-tone of black & white where the former fills in all the background that is not the subject, and often even parts of the subject itself. All this space in your photography is nullified, as if in this emptiness there is magic, metaphysical space, in the manner of fourteenth-century gold backgrounds or Caravaggesque coma.

These luministic beams alter the body, at least compared to what we perceive of it in daylight, in the everyday.Can you tell us about this interest of yours in photographic alteration of the human body?

Hi Lavinia, it's a great pleasure. Of course. This light allows me to bring out details and omit others that, at that precise moment when this dialogue with the subject is established, are irrelevant to my narrative. The latter is always an intimate, dark, dreamlike narrative in which the body mutates becoming something else and the forms take on a space and freedom that they did not have before. The result is an evocative, dreamlike image in which, thanks to the technique of blurring, blurring and a very pronounced grain, I am able to restore a sense of materiality. It is an intimate dialogue (a kind of performance) that is created between me and the person in front of me.

In this body search are you interested in deformation? Does it stimulate you, that is, to seek in the result a reshaped body in the negative compared to the aesthetic standards that society demands? Or is this in your poetics an irrelevant element?

It is not exactly my point of focus. On the opposite, light helps me to make whatever I photograph more pleasing and interesting. That's what I believe in: in the way this can fall with a certain softness on the subject and best define its shapes and roundness. Anything can seem pleasant or unpleasant to us depending on this light. All my research is based on the study of light, as well as the photography itself.

Inevitably, yours is also a dramatic, dark trait. Could you outline, going backwards in your life, why you seek such a pattern?

I think it is an impulse given by an opposite reaction. Living in a city like Naples, which boasts one of the most beautiful lights of all, a now international destination for countless fashion projects that take advantage of its warm and vividly colored landscapes, perhaps a challenge arose within me to search for an image that was in antithesis to this narrative. If I used to focus exclusively on portraits, I gradually came out of the dark room where I established an intimate dialogue with the subject, and this luministic search was also applied to places, to the world. Locations in the city that I had been looking at every day but had never tried to look at in this key. I then set out to photograph at night, rarely using flash and rather taking advantage of the urban lights that I had at my disposal, of street lamps and the windows of houses. I therefore tried to combine the intimate dimension with a more exterior one, while maintaining the same rigor regarding the logic of light and my technique used. Developing a vision that was very personal.

Indeed, the result of this research seems more Nordic than Mediterranean, more ancient than contemporary, completely different from what the world public is used to recognizing as the city of Naples. For as long as I have known you, you have always done photography. I don't remember a single period when you haven't practiced it, and I don't even know if there is one. What is it that drives you to pursue it so vehemently?

It starts from a strong need for communication. I personally believe that I have many communicative limits due to shyness, although over the years I have gradually managed to relate to it better. Photography, in its silence, conveys a lot of noise to me. Liberating cries, sometimes, with respect to all my innermost paranoid fears and urges. Here, I seem to be able to dig into the silence of the photograph to bring forth a sound, a verb. If you will, indeed, it is already in the moment when I look photographically, that I apply this inner recreation. My analog work is also closely linked to the darkroom, a silent place, a place of meditation.

It is very interesting indeed to think of your darkroom, with respect to what you have just said, as a taciturn, hermitical and cogitative place but one that creates your most vibrant and profferitive essences: in this it is therefore identified as a transformative laboratory of alchemy, of transubstantiation. Can you tell us about your project on the industrial outskirts of Naples and why you chose such an area? Did you feel in danger among these streets while working on the project? Were you alone when you were shooting?

The one on the industrial outskirts of Naples is a project that I started in 2021 and that I worked on for a year-before also publishing it in a collective book on the city-a kind of reportage on the eastern outskirts of Naples, Gianturco, an industrial outskirts, a huge urban desert populated by stray dogs, prostitutes and homeless people who roam among the skeletons of factories and desolate streets, everything that belongs to a decayed world, to a collapsed empire. The project is somewhere between a sociological work of industrial archaeology and street photography.
All the photos were taken at night, because only at night I can get these atmospheres that are congenital to me. I chose this area of Naples in contrast to the wonderfully aesthetic and touristic areas of the city, mainly because in Gianturco, for my aesthetic-photographic vision, I find my raw material: every corner, every street, suggested to me an image, a concept, a void that I went to fill. Actually, a feeling of danger I never felt. This place is really desolate, hardly a soul lives there, and the few who do reside there, are almost harmless. I rather made friends, if anything, with the few inhabitants or prostitutes. I used to feed stray dogs. Sometimes it was the locals who helped me or suggested particular streets or buildings. When I entered some factories, like this one below taken from the roof of a former tobacco factory for example, I was able to do so with the help of a writer who knew the places from which to gain access without being seen by security. A certain circumspection is in order, after all. I didn't go there with a Rolex on my arm, let's say, also because I don't have one, lol.

How do you relate to the branding process that is happening in your city? Have you ever performed, moreover, less d’essai and more mainstream work?

The branding of Naples, at least from the point of view of the photography industry, does not really bother me because it is a historical recourse. Naples has always been a cultural destination as well as a stop on the Grand Tour where artists from all over Europe would go to paint the city's landscapes and views in gouache. I am happy that Naples always attracts so many fascinated viewers. I also believe that the gaze of an outside observer will necessarily always be more superficial and homologated than that of one of its inhabitants. Recently I have been proposed to carry out projects related to the fashion for a Neapolitan brand, and what came out of it was a peculiar work, in line with my poetics found in a choice of non-professional models and a minimal photographic direction, left mostly to spontaneity. I used various formats, all analog, and ranged from color to black and white.

What is the shot you are absolutely most proud of and feel most complete, and why?

It is this photo that we see below that depicts a girl turned from the back, beyond which we see only a leg, a shoulder, the outline of her face and her eyes, with this beam of light distorting her back. This photo is not perfect, in fact it is full of technical flaws if you will, yet it is the one that encompasses all the elements that I seek: abstraction through light, intimacy, a dialogue with the subject, since her eyes scrutinize me more than I was doing with her while taking the photo. This is the essence of my photographic vision: this getting involved and seduced by the subject. It is the vibration that stands out from this photo that made me choose it as the cover of my first self-produced fanzine between 2017/18, Sleepless, which collects diptychs composed of nude portraits and cityscapes, which dialogue with each other through assonances and dissonances.

What is your most coveted project, the photographic dream you would like to realize?

Tough question. At least currently, it is a project that I would like to bring out within the next year: a photographic book that has as its theme my language and visual research through a leitmotif that traces situations, people and places with a well-defined logic. A collection of images along a journey through the night. A long editing job that will help me take stock of my photographic practice and give me new creative stimuli to start new paths.

I admit it can be arduous to choose, but if you could take one photographer with you on a lifeboat setting sail from a world on fire, which one would you choose? I also know that you are a wise admirer of movies and music, and that you love to read: what is your favorite movie, singer/band, and book?

On the conceptual, human and style level not only of photography but of life, I would say to you: Miroslav Tichy, for several reasons. I share with him the need to rework the image several times in the darkroom, and I really admire his naturalness and his subjects who did not imagine that they were being photographed, and therefore they are necessarily spontaneous.

There is a film that has thunderstruck me, which I watched for the first time two years ago and which continues to be a source of inspiration for me for various reasons, particularly because of its extreme authenticity. There are some even far-fetched situations and yet it remains an extremely strong, raw, sincere film: The life and death of a Pornogang, a Serbian independent movie directed by Mladen Djordevic. The Coils: their entire musical output from the 1980s until 2004 with the death of John Balance. Lautréamont's The songs of Maldoror, an epic poem from the 1800s about a man who explores his darkest sides, malignant even: which is ultimately about human nature.