During the Nineties, Johnny Shand Kydd has been the privileged and ingenious witness of the outbreak of creation that has overwhelmed every kind of art in London. All the protagonists of that outstanding moment have been shot by his lens with the same energy, the same pressing rhythm, the same joie de vivre passing through the studios, galleries, fashion-shows and night-clubs of the British capital in order to celebrate and instantaneously make a note of an unpredictable and continuously changing process. Frequenting the subjects of his works and being familiar with them has allowed him to take a route and select materials suggested by the intense chronology of events, by a knowledge and a direct participation to the pathos his portraits show.
The Neapolitan adventure rewrites the rules of the game. The city and its inhabitants, its ancient myth for the first time offer themselves to his eyes. The man and his lens get deliberately lost in the mysterious and unexpected maze of the city quarters seeking after a fragment, an impression shutting up within the limits of a photogram, for a magic and unique moment, the indescribable and unbreakable vital flow passing through the daily life and through the history of the Parthenopean metropolis.
History and contemporariness look for and repel each other, duelling, supported by their own weight, embracing both the melancholy, the brutality and the circumspection of the former and the restlessness, the speed and the ineluctability of the latter.
Shand Kydd’s Naples is the intimate diary of a solitary journey.