Capri – Luigi Ghirri / Mimmo Jodice (2nd edition)

This book takes us to the seaside and precisely to a marvellous place called Capri. An island in the Tyrrhenian Sea on the south side of the Gulf of Naples, Capri is famous for all those celebrities on yachts, the amazing cuisine, and water in colors you have to see to believe.

This book, released 1983, has texts written by Cesare de Seta – renown architectural historian and essayist – that accompany the photographs by Luigi Ghirri and Mimmo Jodice.
The book was published on behalf of a so-called ERi, an acronym that stands for Edizioni della RAI-Radiotelevisione Italiana (Italian public tv and radio channel). It is therefore a commissioned work, a book that was not conceived as an artistic project but more as a sort of luxury tourist guide for a wide readership.

As the book itself clears, Ghirri’s photographs are in colour, while Jodice’s  are in black and white. Both authors were quite used to work on commissioned commercial projects, always keeping a very high profile and a very personal point of view – as it is also the case here, especially as far as Ghirri’s work is concerned.

A curiosity: ERI editions existed since the 1920s, when they started publishing a television and radio guide for the first program. At the end of the 1940s they began publishing books of all kinds, mostly related to cultural issues.

Pablo Neruda describes the island of Capri in a famous poem as ‘the queen of rock / in your dress colored lily and amaranth’