Alessandra Coppola imprints memories of a family history

Alessandra Coppola is a photographer who lives in Naples.
Partenope, for her, is a theatre of experimentation and a source of creativity. She started approaching photography as a teenager, and never imagined it would become her profession. Her initial impulse was to keep what fascinated her, and when she couldn’t find it, she invented it.

She began to experiment with her vision as a reporter, in the clubs, in the queer world of the Neapolitan nightlife where the subjects became actors on a stage of which she could not remain a spectator. It was there that Alessandra realized how beautiful and necessary it was for her to go beyond observation and capture what needed to be imprinted to be told and not forgotten. Reportage, therefore, was her starting point, and it is the vision that still encompasses her shots. Telling a true story, lived by herself or by others, stories of characters she has met or who live in her imagination, giving them form and life as much as possible, in a real context, sometimes raw and bare.

These are the main elements that describe what moves her or belongs to me; essentially her vision of things. From a strictly aesthetic point of view, my work focuses above all on the figure of the man and his anatomy, preferring androgynous models, through fashion shots or simple portraits, which come to life on film and sometimes on cassette tapes. Even the settings become fundamental for her, real secondary characters that complete the story: suburbs, beaches in winter, warm interiors in summer, deserted and cold streets in autumn; each of them encloses the story of the subject, and the subject tells his story, which is his own.

About Via Vipera – words by Alessandra Coppola:

Like an old family album, memories of hot summer days are imprinted, recounting the playfulness, carefreeness, and togetherness of three brothers.

The focus is on the surrounding area, a farmhouse on the outskirts of town, Via Vipera, far from the big city and surrounded by greenery, a reflection on the character’s relationship with the place and with themselves and their family history.

The project narrates the various moments of the day covered by the three brothers, who are of different ages, and how each one represents an important phase in the growth of the individual: childhood and adolescence.

Through the clothes, we can hardly distinguish the seasons, from light wool to shorts and clogs. You can almost feel the clothes being handed down in the family from generation to generation. Time is not defined. We are in the early post-war period of the 1950s or even the 1970s. The countryside retains the aesthetics of an enclosed, indelible, unchanging era.