My hometown is a visceral bond of sharp contrasts and sudden embraces. I love and hate it, it lifts me up and crushes me, I admire it and it frightens me. When I’m away, I miss it with an almost physical ache. Yet when I walk its streets, I long to be anywhere but there. It’s a constant tension, an inner dialogue that never finds peace.
Naples is made of opposites that coexist and feed on each other. The chasm between wealthy districts and run-down neighborhoods is more than architecture. It’s a human landscape, an emotional map that forces you to swing between wonder and unease. A single turn might place you in front of a baroque church overwhelming you with theatrical power, or in a narrow alley where laundry lines tangle with electric wires and life pulses in every detail.
Here, past and present don’t follow one another — they overlap. The grandeur of what has been speaks with the force of what unfolds now, an unstable yet surprisingly vital balance. Every building carries centuries of glory and scars. Every face holds stories that don’t need words.
Naples is Safarà, Hamlin’s transdimensional shop. You know when you enter, but you can’t be sure how — or if — you’ll ever leave. It’s an experience that envelops and transforms you: a place that devours and returns, deceives and reveals. Photographing it is like trying to capture a mirage. Just when you think you’ve grasped it, the city shifts, shows another face, and slips away again.
With these images I tried to freeze a fragment of that multiplicity, knowing each shot is only a shard, a partial truth. Perhaps that’s the point: accepting that Naples never fully belongs to you, that it remains an enigma — a luminous, unfathomable wound.
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