A Photographer Turns to Naples, and the Guardian Prints the Portraits

The Guardian's art and design section has published a photographic series by Roman Manfredi, made on the streets of Naples, depicting people the paper describes as living outside binary gender expectations. The gallery is titled, in the photographer's words, I was drawn to the femminielli, and the Guardian presents the work as intimate portraiture rather than documentary reportage.

The femminielli are a long-standing presence in Neapolitan life, and the Guardian's framing places them within a discussion of gender that is largely conducted in English-language media. The paper supplies no date for the photographs, no exhibition details and no interviews beyond the photographer's own quoted line.

What the Guardian does provide is the city itself. Naples is the subject as much as the sitters, and the gallery's title locates the work in a specific street culture rather than in a studio.

Foreign coverage of Naples tends to arrive in one of two registers: the city as a problem, or the city as an authenticity. Manfredi's series belongs to the second, and the Guardian's presentation leans on the intimacy of the portraits rather than on any social argument. The paper does not claim the images document a movement, and it does not date them.

The term femminielli is used in the Guardian's headline without translation or extended definition, which suggests the paper expects its readers to encounter it as a Neapolitan word rather than an English category. That is an unusual choice for a British outlet, and it leaves the cultural specificity of the subject largely intact.

For the culture desk, the interest is in what travels and what does not. A photographic tradition rooted in one city's streets is legible abroad as portraiture, and the Guardian has published it that way. The paper offers no claim about how the sitters see themselves, and La Veduta does not add one.

The gallery appears in the Guardian's art and design pages rather than its news section, which is where the paper places work it wants read as visual culture. No exhibition, book or institutional context is mentioned in the report. The images stand, in the Guardian's presentation, on their own.