by  Mimmo Jodice

Mimmo Jodice is born in Naples where he lives and works. His name is well known in the history of Contemporary Photography.
When he was very young, he dedicated himself to painting and drawing and was passionately interested in arts, classical music and jazz.
In the early 1960’s he discovered Photography as a new means of expressions. He began to experiment different materials, abstract forms and all linguistic and tehnical aspects of Photography.
During the 1970’s he was in contact with the most important avant-garde artistis, who worked and exposed in Naples: Warhol, Beuys, Kounelis, De Dominicis, Paolini.Sol Lewitt, Kosuth and many others.
He was deeply involved with these new artistic movements and he devoted himself more and more to conceptual and creative Photography. But it was also a period of social urgency which Jodice answered with passionate engagement.

In 1969 he began teaching Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, where he taught until 1994.
His first solo exhibition was held at the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino in 1968 and in 1970 his work “ Dentro Cartelle Ermetiche” was exhibited in Milan at the Galleria il Diaframma, with a texte by Cesare Zavattini. In 1980 he started to develop a new perspective in which human figure was no longer the protagonist, concentrating with a new empty, menacing, urban space, laden with metaphysical memories. His book “ Vedute di Napoli” marks a change in his language: his photographs will be more and more detached from reality , immersed in a visionary and silent dimension.
In 1981 he took part at the exhibition “ Expression of Human Condition” , with Diana Arbus , Larry Clark, Lisette Model and William Klein at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
In the following years a double thread ran through Jodice’s work : on the one hand a surreal and uneasy vision of urban landscapes and on the other hand an attention with the imprints of the past on the present and, at the same time, a research of his roots and the myths of Mediterranean.

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