Those who have travelled off the beaten track through the Italian south in recent summers will know the empty piazzas at lunchtime, where dogs doze in the semi-shade of the cathedrals, two to three tourists roam the streets in search of art or food, and where, above all, everything is closed. Shutters, doors, restaurants, shops, churches. Instead, silence, flickering heat, the sun high in the sky, sharp contrasts. A bar in the city centre may be open, usually next to the main church or town hall, possibly also a small museum. At around 5 pm the torpor dissolves, urban life returns to the street, shutters open, shop blinds are pushed up, widows sparsely occupy the church benches.
Those who stayed in towns and cities in Italy in the spring of 2020 experienced this well-known lunchtime scene all day, everywhere. And now we came to know this emptiness differently, heard the silence in another way; the shops and bars were still closed, but it wasn’t the same. Even big city dwellers had experienced it: the quiet, the emptiness, the contrast to “before”. The Spanish Steps in Rome deserted, no more long queues in front of the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain in monumental silence. These images went around the world and met with similar content from other metropolises such as Paris, New York, or Madrid. The fascinating thing was feeling one was participating in this situation, contributing to it through absence, our virtual connection with a place and the thought that you could stand there in a very short time – as, for example, the direct proximity of the Bibliotheca Hertziana in the Palazzo Zuccari to the Spanish Steps would allow. The curfews involved us in the latest goings on in the city, without us actually and physically being allowed to be part of them.

For this exhibition, we have selected photographs taken in Rome and Naples in the spring of 2020 during the hard lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. For over three months, people in Italy were only allowed to leave their homes in a few exceptional cases with good reasons. Only essential activities could still be carried out outside one’s own four walls. The profession of photographer was one of them.
Enrico Fontolan, Marcello Leotta, and Luciano Pedicini and his sons Marco and Matteo photographed renowned and lesser-known monuments, residential streets and individual buildings, large panoramas and small details. Whatever seemed remarkable was recorded, and in these weeks this also meant the long-familiar, the thousand-times recalled, things that had been photographed and documented millions of times. It is not that the Trevi Fountain had suddenly become another monument, the Colosseum another ancient amphitheatre, but the process of photographic documentation was different. Not the object in front of the camera, but the person behind it had changed, and with them also the viewer of the photographs. With the semantic addition of “lockdown”, they have not only received a time stamp, but also a new quality – quite an emotional one – which distinguishes them from previous documentary photographs. Roland Barthes’ essay Rhétorique de l’image (Communications 4, 1964) analyses the mutual condition of concept and image by distinguishing between the non-coded (denoted) pictorial message, the coded (connoted) contextual pictorial message, and finally the linguistic message, which specifies the framework of the image’s possible interpretations via the accompanying text. Here, the term “lockdown” connotes and fixes the photographed view, as in the developer bath. “The viewer is in the picture” – rarely have individual photographs, let alone series of images, been bestowed with such an individual and collective level of meaning, one that goes far beyond what is physically visible.