A Guardian Photo Essay Turns Its Lens on Naples, and on the Femminielli

The Guardian's Art & Design desk has published a photographic series by Roman Manfredi, made on the streets of Naples, portraying locals who live outside binary gender expectations. The paper's framing is explicit: the photographer, it reports, was drawn to the femminielli, a figure with a long history in the city. The gallery presents the work as intimate portraiture rather than reportage, and it is the intimacy, as much as the subject, that the Guardian's presentation emphasises.

For readers abroad, the femminielli are often introduced as a curiosity of the south — a colourful footnote to Naples. The photographs work against that. They are portraits of named individuals in their own spaces, and the Guardian's captioning treats them as such, which shifts the register from spectacle to portraiture.

The publication is a reminder of how the foreign press tends to arrive at Naples: through images. The city's visual culture — its streets, its faces, its theatre of daily life — travels more easily in a gallery than in a news dispatch, and the Guardian has placed this series squarely in its arts coverage rather than its Italy reporting.

The femminielli occupy an unusual place in Italian cultural history. They are associated above all with Naples, and with specific neighbourhoods and devotional traditions, and they have been written about and photographed by outsiders for decades. That long record cuts both ways: it has given the subject international visibility, and it has produced a great deal of work in which the photographer's fascination is more visible than the sitter's life. Manfredi's series, as the Guardian presents it, belongs to the second tradition only in part — the pictures are close, domestic, collaborative in feel.

There is a comparative point here that the foreign coverage tends to make implicitly. Italy's cultural institutions have moved slowly on questions of gender and representation; the country's public conversation on these matters is frequently described abroad as more contested than in northern Europe. Meanwhile the femminielli have been part of Neapolitan popular culture for generations — a reminder, as the Guardian's framing suggests, that the Italian south has its own long-standing vocabulary for what the rest of the country is still arguing about.

For the cultural economy of the region, the effect is familiar. A single photographic series in a major international outlet brings attention to a city's image-makers, its galleries and its independent publishing scene, and it tends to be followed by exhibitions and book projects. That is how Naples has built much of its recent cultural standing abroad: not through institutional announcements but through the steady accumulation of foreign coverage of its photographers, its theatre and its music.

What the Guardian piece does not do is resolve the tension at the heart of the genre. Photographing people who live outside binary gender expectations, for an audience that mostly does not, raises the question of who the picture is finally for. The paper presents the work without answering that question, which is probably the honest position. The photographs are on the Guardian's site; the argument about them will continue in Naples.