November 2025
On October 28, Mimmo Jodice died in Naples at the age of 91. With him, we lose one of the last great masters of Italian photography, an artist who had made black and white his mother tongue and silence his most powerful voice. This summer, he had participated with his works in the Meeting exhibition “I Sentieri del Sacro” (The Paths of the Sacred), in what would be one of his last public testimonies.
A son of the Rione Sanità who dialogued with the world
Born on March 29, 1934, in the Rione Sanità district, Mimmo had never severed his umbilical cord with Naples. The city was not just his favorite subject: it was his way of looking at the world, the lens through which he interpreted Mediterranean light and the mysteries of the everyday.
He had started like many Neapolitan youths in the 1950s: drawing, attending the theater, listening to music. Photography arrived almost by chance in the early 1960s, but it was an immediate love affair. It wasn’t enough for him to document: he wanted to reinvent reality, to dismantle and reassemble it in his darkroom, which he called his “laboratory of visual alchemy.”
When Warhol and Beuys passed through Naples
The 1960s and 1970s were extraordinary for Neapolitan art. The city was an essential stop for the international avant-garde, and Jodice found himself at the center of that revolution. Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt, and Jannis Kounellis would stop by his studio. He photographed them, talked with them, learned from them. But above all, he remained himself: a Neapolitan who looked at the world with the eyes of someone who knows the weight of history and the lightness of improvisation.
His 1974 series “Chi è devoto” (Who is devout) documented popular religious festivals with an anthropological yet never detached gaze. He knew those rites from the inside; he had lived them as a child. He knew that behind every procession, every ex-voto, every whispered prayer, there was a story worth telling.
The Final Testimony at the Meeting: I Sentieri del Sacro
Last August, from the 22nd to the 27th, some of his most intense photographs were displayed in the exhibition “THE PATHS OF THE SACRED - Gestures and Rituals of Faith in Contemporary Photography”at the Rimini Meeting. It was an exhibition that, in the year of the Jubilee of Hope, brought together the work of great masters of Italian and international photography on the theme of the sacred.
“Mimmo Jodice,” says the exhibition’s curator, Micol Forti, “was a great artist, a man of rare human and intellectual sensitivity. His photographic research educated our gaze to read and observe the world in its multiple expressions in a new and authentic way, in search of a beauty enclosed not only in form, but in the spiritual and human essence of people and places.”
Those who visited the exhibition remember his images as moments of pure visual poetry. Alongside the works of Gianni Berengo Gardin, Antonio Biasiucci, Giorgia Fiorio, Mario Giacomelli, Ferdinando Scianna, and international giants like Sebastião Salgado, Jodice’s photographs told of that dimension of the sacred he knew so intimately: not the solemn and distant one, but the everyday one, made of small gestures, of silences filled with meaning, of light that becomes prayer.
Curators Micol Forti and Alessandra Mauro had chosen precisely those of his images where the sacred manifests in the ordinary: processions that seem like ancient dances, ex-votos that become silent poems, faces of devotees in which one can read a faith that comes from afar. Jodice had this unique ability: to photograph not only what is seen, but also what is felt with the soul.
