From Streets to Silence: The Early Experiments of Mimmo Jodice
There’s something quietly theatrical about seeing Mimmo Jodice’s photographs inside the stone rooms of Udine Castle. The current exhibition Mimmo Jodice. L’enigma della luce gathers some 140 images made between 1964 and 2015, and it reads like a short history of modern Italian photography - from restless conceptual experiments to those brooding, almost metaphysical portraits of place for which Jodice is best known.
Remark: All photos of the exhibition can be viewed on my Gallery Website.
Mimmo Jodice. The Enigma of Light. Exhibition views at the Civic Museum of Udine, 2025
From Naples to the museum: a short arc
Born in Naples in 1934, Domenico “Mimmo” Jodice began as a self-taught experimenter in the early 1960s and quickly became a central figure in Italy’s photographic avant-garde. He taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli from 1970 to 1996, directing the country’s first university photography course and shaping generations of practitioners. Over decades his practice moved from documentary and conceptual projects toward the luminous urban and archaeological landscapes that dominate his later reputation.
The hunger for experiment: Jodice’s early conceptual years
If you want to understand Jodice, start with the 1960s and 1970s - the period often described as his “conceptual years.” At that time he was less interested in straightforward illustration than in probing what a photograph could be: material processes, unusual printing techniques, serial sequences, staged juxtapositions and images that referenced other arts (painting, sculpture, performance). He photographed artists and events from the international scene - documentary work that doubled as conceptual commentary - and he showed early solo work in Italian venues from the late 1960s onward. These years were shaped by experimentation with materials and processes, and by a taste for collaborations and dialogues with contemporary art movements (Pop, Arte Povera, Fluxus).
Mimmo Jodice. The Enigma of Light. Exhibition views at the Civic Museum of Udine, 2025
Those early experiments are important because they establish two constants in Jodice’s work: (1) a refusal to treat the camera as a neutral recorder, and (2) a fascination with time and memory - how the visible present is always haunted by the traces of the past. Many of the prints you’ll see in Udine display the tactile traces of the darkroom as if the paper itself bears narrative scars.
Street photography, Naples, and the grammar of the everyday
Parallel to his conceptual and documentary practice, Jodice developed a sustained engagement with Naples - not as picturesque backdrop but as a palimpsest of social life and historical layers. His street photography is not mere reportage; it’s an ethnography of light and silence. He frames alleyways, domestic ritual, urban decay and sculptures in ways that feel both intimate and monumental. Faces and façades, scooters and statuary, human gestures and empty thresholds - Jodice’s streets turn into stage sets where the city’s ancient memory meets contemporary grit. Critics often describe these images as “metaphysical”; they are quiet but charged, simultaneously specific to Naples and universal in mood.
Technically, Jodice favored black-and-white film and large, tactile prints (carbon, coal, or alternative processes in many series). That palette and printmaking approach amplify the photographic surface - grain, contrast and the mineral quality of stone and skin - reinforcing the sense that these are meditations on duration rather than snapshots of the moment.
Portraits of artists and the camera as witness
During the 1960s and 70s Jodice photographed many of the era’s major artists, sometimes as documentation of performances and sometimes as standalone portraits. These images function on two levels: they document a historic moment in contemporary art, and they interrogate portraiture itself - how presence is captured, staged or declawed by the photographic gaze. This documentary-conceptual hybridity is one reason Jodice’s work sits comfortably both in museum survey shows and in conversations about avant-garde practice.
Dialogues with Artists and Photographers
Mimmo Jodice’s career cannot be understood in isolation. From the late 1960s onward he moved at the intersection of photography and contemporary art, forging close ties with both Italian and international figures. In Naples, through the visionary gallerist Lucio Amelio, Jodice encountered artists of Pop, Fluxus and Arte Povera — photographing Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and many others. These portraits were never simple documents: they became conceptual works in their own right, emphasising the performative encounter between camera and artist.
At the same time, Jodice’s dialogue with Italian photographers such as Ugo Mulas, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Lisetta Carmi, Mario Cresci and Franco Fontana grounded him in a national network that was defining what Italian photography could be. His exchanges with Henri Cartier-Bresson and admiration for Bill Brandt placed him within a broader European context. What emerges is a practice nourished by cross-pollination: Jodice absorbed the avant-garde’s experiments and returned them, transformed, in images that still bear the weight of Naples’s streets and the light of the Mediterranean.
Dialogues Between Frescoes and Photographs
One of the most striking aspects of the Udine Castle exhibition is the way Jodice’s photographs are staged within the (exhibition) architecture. The curators have built a series of small, house-like enclosures - intimate chambers where each room focuses on a distinct part of his creative periods. Yet these rooms have no ceilings. As you move through them, your gaze rises toward the frescoed vaults of the historic castle above. The effect is powerful: Jodice’s stark black-and-white images, presented on white walls in classic passepartouts offer a deliberate contradiction to the ornate, brightly painted ceilings. It’s as if the contemporary photographic vision and the Renaissance past are locked in dialogue, inviting visitors to feel suspended between the stillness of the photograph and the narrative exuberance of the fresco.
L’enigma della luce at the Castello di Udine organizes this long career so you can trace those recurring obsessions - memory, time, the dialogue between classical and contemporary, and above all light as a shaping force. Seeing early experimental sequences next to later archaeological or urban landscapes makes plain how consistent Jodice’s questions have been, even when his visual language shifted. I personally enjoyed his early work the most!
A final note: If you go, allow time to look slowly. Jodice’s images reward patience: a face, a wall, a fragment of statue will reveal its history the longer you stand with it. The castle’s cool masonry and quiet galleries are a fitting home for photographs that are always, in their best moments, conspiracies between light and stone.
MIMMO JODICE. THE ENIGMA OF LIGHT
Castle, Parliament Hall and adjoining rooms of the Old Art Gallery (11, 12 and 13)
5 April – 4 November, 2025
Exhibition organised by the Civic Museums of Udine edited by Silvia Bianco, Alessandra Mauro, Roberto Koch in collaboration with Angela Salomone Iodice, Barbara Iodice, Suleima Autore.
Remark: All photos of the exhibition can be viewed on my Gallery Website.
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