Further praise for Gomorrah Girl and I am nothing by Valerio Spada, Twin Palms Publishers
‘Gomorrah Girl by Valerio Spada, this is a book that I can really learn something from.’
Jim Goldberg, Magnum Photos
‘Spada’s book – self-published, stapled together, a brilliant combination of the roughhewn with the exquisite – is a memorial for a dead girl, a cri de coeur for vulnerable young women and a penetrating examination of the social ills resulting from a corrupt and rotten political system.’
Martin Parr / Gerry Badger, A History of Photobooks Vol. III, Phaidon
“At first glance, Gomorrah Girl may seem to be an unassuming even haphazard book, but as each page unfolds, the viewer is challenged by layers of meaning.”“This is a moving book of photographs and documents that one wants to return to repeatedly,” says Himes, (Head of International Photographs at Christie’s), describing what made the book a winner.
Darius Himes, Christie’s International Photographs, TIME Magazine
"I am nothing" by Valerio Spada is an impressive work because it shows us the silence, the penetration of crime in everyday life and our failure or inability to defend ourselves.
Roberto Saviano, Author
Excerpts from The Photobook: A History, Volume III - Phaidon Martin Parr and Gerry Badger on Valerio Spada
The Camorra is the Neapolitan Mafia, whose name was transliterated to Gomorrah for the well-known 2008 film by Matteo Garrone, and also for Valerio Spada’s book about the decaying neighbourhood of Scampia in Naples. Gomorrah Girl is a two-part, multi-level book, firstly about a crime and then about the social conditions in a city slum in which the Mafia is all pervasive and exploitative.
The crime was the death of the fourteen-year-old Annalisa Durante, who was caught in the crossfire of a Camorra-related shoot-out. Spada takes scans of the police report on the event: crime-scene photographs ballistic analysis and so on. There is a portrait of the victim’s background in the second edition of the book, which is on a different paper size, interleaved between the pages of police evidence.
This second edition concentrates upon social conditions in Scampia, and mainly upon the ‘Gomorrah’ girls, young women who are forced by poverty and crime to grow up before their time. Some of them end up as prostitutes working for the Mafia, some become addicts on drugs supplied by the Mafia and some become mothers at fourteen – or all three.
Spada’s book – self-published, stapled together, a brilliant combination of the rough-hewn with the exquisite – is a memorial for a dead girl, a cri de coeur for vulnerable young women and a penetrating examination of the social ills resulting from a corrupt and rotten political system.
Documentary is a wholly inadequate term to describe the multiplicity of strategies employed by these photographers. Story-telling is a better way of putting it, since many are willing to mix documentary with fiction and found photographs with their own work, not caring whether their books are ‘true’ as long as they tell thruths about their authors’ intent.
The term ‘conceptual documentary’ has become fashionable to
describe a more cerebral approach to both the complex problems of photographic representation and a certain type of photography examining society. It seems something of a nebulous term, as much to the arena in which the work is displayed – the art gallery – as to any fundamental character.
In short, the work is deemed ‘conceptual’ because the photographer – or rather, the artist – designates it as it such, often, it seems to denigrate the ‘documentary’ and boost the ‘conceptual’ part of the term.
Nevertheless, conceptual documentary refers to a kind of pre- planning and the setting up of a kind formal structure – frequently presentational – on the part of the artist. Perhaps ‘formalized documentary’ is a more accurate way to describe it. Many of the more interesting recent documentary books are in this vein. A complex, collaged approach has become the vogue, as in Jim Goldberg’s Open See (2009), Valerio Spada’s Gomorrah Girl (2011) or David Alan Harvey’s (Based on a true story) (2012). They can consist of the photographer’s own imagery and that of others, and might contain separate booklets with text or fac-simile objects. They might contain fabricated photographs (shades of Bill Brandt in the 1930s) as well as ‘slice of life’ photographs. And even if the shooting part of the process is relatively straightforward, photographers are certainly giving full reign to their imaginations at the book-making stage.
Francesco Zanot, MAST Curator - On Valerio Spada Exhibition "I am nothing"
'Gomorrah Girl' and 'I am nothing' are the main series produced by the young photographer Valerio Spada. Thanks to the first series, he made himself known throughout the world in 2011, while he has recently brought the second to a close thanks to the support of a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation in New York. Both revolve around the study of the most typical and yet obscure aspects of the major
Italian criminal organizations: the Neapolitan Camorra and the Sicilian Mafia. And yet these are not mere reportages, but combine truth and storytelling, diary and theatre, both candid and staged photography. They are cinematographic fiction raised to the level of judiciary truth. And vice versa.
Darius Himes, Christie’s International Photographs
“At first glance, Gomorrah Girl may seem to be an unassuming even haphazard book, but as each page unfolds, the viewer is challenged by layers of meaning.”
“This is a moving book of photographs and documents that one wants to return to repeatedly,” says Himes, (Head of International Photographs at Christie’s), describing what made the book a winner.
ALLIE HAEUSSLEIN - Director Pier 24 Photography Review for Photo Eye on Valerio Spada Gomorrah Girl
"Many of these girls will soon marry Camorristi... Many will bear children who will be killed... But for now they are just little girls in black. They weep for a friend... Annalisa is guilty of having been born in Naples. Nothing more, nothing less.”* —Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah
On March 27, 2004, fourteen-year-old Annalisa Durante was fatally shot in the back of her head outside her family home, caught in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting; the intended target, nineteen-year- old Camorra boss Salvatore Giulano, was accused of using the young
girl as a shield. Though Italian journalist Roberto Saviano had spent some time infiltrating the Camorra — the centuries old mafia-like organization that controls Naples — it was ultimately Annalisa's tragic death
that encouraged him to write his impassioned exposé, Gomorrah. Annalisa’s death is also the backbone of Valerio Spada’s Gomorrah Girl, an examination of the fraught relationship between female adolescence and the culture of violence defining present-day Naples.
Gomorrah Girl combines Neapolitan landscapes and portraits by Spada with rephotographed pages from the police investigation of Annalisa’s death and exists as two intermingled books. The worn pages of the police report — printed on something akin to newsprint — are interspersed with Spada’s own smaller, glossy photographs. You cannot view one without seeing the other. As a result, the lives of these young women and the landscape they occupy can only be viewed within the somber context of Annalisa’s death, producing a disquieting overtone regarding the future of the young women depicted.
Gomorrah Girl. By Valerio Spada. Twin Palms, 2014.
The crime scene photographs from Annalisa’s death are analytical, unsentimental and sterile — ballistics images, streets covered in evidence markers, approximations of bullet trajectories. They attempt to document and explain. And while they are necessary, there is a dark irony — no matter how much this crime is picked apart and the evidence is analyzed, it is ultimately an unsatisfactory explanation for a senseless event.
Spada’s images of young women are highly charged; there is a tension at play, a sense that something is amiss. Allusions to childhood — Hello Kitty, Daisy Duck, oversized headbands and plastic jewelry – appear duplicitous in the company of his subjects. They do not feel like children; they appear sexualized and desensitized to the violence that surrounds and subsumes them. The faces of these teenagers are viscerally hardened, projecting austere personas developed for survival.
A jarring picture that presents a telling metaphor for both the loss of innocence and the marginalization of women depicts a lone woman shooting up, completely ignored by the three men to her left. The photograph was taken in one of the most dangerous places in Italy known as “La Scuola” or “I Puffi” (The School or Smurfs House), a name that refers to the locale’s former life as a kindergarten. A place intended to educate and nurture youth falls victim to a culture with little room to experience childhood.
Gomorrah Girl. By Valerio Spada. Twin Palms, 2014.
Gomorrah Girl. By Valerio Spada. Twin Palms, 2014.
Gomorrah Girl. By Valerio Spada. Twin Palms, 2014.
Italy is often associated with the Coliseum, Pompeii, Tuscan hillsides and quaint cobbled roads. It is a struggle to conceive of the inhumane underbelly of a place we so blissfully romanticize. Hollywood portrayals of mafia-like organizations such as The Godfather or The Sopranos conceal the reality of these groups and their implications on society. Spada pulls the rose-colored glasses from our eyes, forcing us to consider how the intimidation, violence and machismo perpetuated by the Camorra reverberates through the fabric of a major city — the third largest municipality in Italy. The final photograph in Gomorrah Girl leaves us uneasy. The thirty-one year old “killer of Scampia” is positioned on a motorcycle in front of a series of apartment buildings, staring straight into the camera’s lens. His girlfriend, who did not want her portrait taken, is almost entirely obscured; all that is visible is a small sliver of her face and downcast gaze. Leaving us to wonder — what will become of these Gomorrah Girls?—ALLIE HAEUSSLEIN
Guggenheim Foundation Official Page Bio
Valerio Spada lives between New York and Milan. His work is exhibited, collected, and published internationally. On September 2011, Time magazine announced his first self-published book Gomorrah Girl to win the Grand Prize PBN Photography Book Now 2011 as Best Book of the Year, nominated by a panel of eleven international judges, among them Darius Himes, Steve McCurry, and Gerry Badger. Gomorrah Girl was nominated in various Best Book of the Year 2011 Lists, Joerg Colberg (USA), Rob Honstra (Holland), Marc Feustel (Eyecurious, France), Photo Eye with four nominations by John Gossage, Horacio Fernandez, Darius Himes, and Gerry Badger.
Source:
http://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/valerio-spada/
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Widewalls, Martinique, Elena. Documenting the Italian Mafia - Valerio Spada at Benrubi Gallery, Switzerland
Artsy, Valerio Spada. I am nothing. Benrubi Gallery, NYC, USA
i-D Magazine no.352 Adolescents in Marseille. Valerio Spada chronicles the lives of the teenagers of the melting pot port city of Marseille. Interview by Felix Petty. UK
TIME Magazine, TIME Special Preview: A guide to the best Spring/Summer Photobooks, USA
i-D Magazine, White, Ryan. How Valerio Spada captures the truth behind the headlines. UK
Sky Arte (TV) Valerio Spada e Magnum a Camera, Centro Nazionale per la Fotografia. Italy
The logging road, ...Trying to document my lost adolescence through the traumatic lives of others. A conversation with Valerio Spada, UK
i-D Magazine, Valerio Spada fotografa la mafia come nessun altro sa fare. Italy
Internazionale. La mafia raccontata da Valerio Spada in mostra a Torino. Italy
Vogue Italia. Italian Panorama. 15 best italian potographers shoots A/W 17/18. Italy
i-D Magazine, Valerio Spada's year in Photos, UK
Vogue Italia, Casadio, Mariuccia. Et maintenant la prochaine, Silvia Venturini Fendi on Karl Lagerfeld. Italy
The GAP. Worldwide Summer Campaign. Portrait of an American Summer. USA
Adweek. Gap found real people, not models, for its Summer Ads celebrating American diversity. USA
Ads of the World. The Gap by Valerio Spada, USA
British Journal of Photography. Seymour, Tom. The Italian Renaissance of Photography. UK
The Guardian. O’Hagan, Sean. The DIY Saviours of Photography. UK
Stern Crime. Ritter, Andrea. Es sind doch noch kinder – Valerio Spada. Germany (ADC Awarded Issue)
Enciclopedia della Moda, Spada Valerio - Italy
Dazed & Confused. Christiansen, Anne. The most exciting new photography books. Self Publish, Be Happy by Ceschel featuring Gomorrah Girl by Valerio Spada in the best photobooks self-published will launch at Foam Amsterdam and New York Book Art Fair. UK
Lomography. Laranjeira, Marta. An interview with Valerio Spada. UK
L'Oeil de la Photographie. Attinger, Irène. April selection best books Maison Européenne de la Photographie. France
SVA, NY. New books: Focus on Photography featuring Vivian Maier, Valerio Spada, Larry Fink, Larry Sultan, La Toya Ruby Frazier. USA
Book review, Haeusslein, Allie, Director Pier24 Photography, Photo-Eye, USA
Art Tribune, Valerio Spada I am nothing
Icon Magazine, La Fotografia ad Artissima, Italy
Camera, Torino, Valerio Spada, I am nothing Solo Exhibition, Italy
Lightwork, AIR, Valerio Spada, Collected prints
The New York Times IE, Tripoli, Gaia. An unfullfilled dream of escape, Gomorrah Girl by Valerio Spada. Page 2. USA
Playground, Muñoz, Alba. Gomorra Girl: así viven y mueren las adolescentes de la mafia, Brasil
Il Post, Le ragazze di Gomorrah, Italy
L'Oeil de la Photographie. Avedon, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Avedon talks to Valerio Spada, France
TIME Magazine, Lightbox, Best Spring/Summer 2014 PhotoBooks, USA
The Huffington Post. A haunting look at the Italian Mafia, Brunamonti, Filippo, USA
TVE2 (TV) Gomorrah Girl at Galeria Cero. TV Interview for La Aventura del Saber, Spain
TVE1 (TV) Lorenzo, Áurea. Valerio Spada, Gomorrah Girl, TV Interview for TeleDiario
RTVE (TV) Segura Albert, Luisa. Hacerse mayor conviviendo con la Camorra, Spain
Fraulen Magazine, Leinen, Lisa. Berlusconis Vermachtnis, Interview with Valerio Spada, Germany
The Photobook Review, Issue One, Ladd, Jeffrey. On Gomorrah Girl with Syb, Aperture Foundation, USA
Lens Magazine. Yue, Geng. On the strees in Naples, Valerio Spada interview, China
Hoolingan Magazine. Evtushenko, Yan. Valerio Spada interview on Gomorrah Girl, Russia
Peanut Butter Thoughts. Cheung, SGH. Valerio Spada – United Kingdom
ASX, American Suburb X. Rickard, Doug, Himes, Darius. Christie's Head of Photographs. PBN Winner: Gomorrah Girl, video, USA
TIME Magazine, Moakley, Paul. Gomorrah Girl: Best in Show, USA
IMSO, The land of the Camorrah, Five Award-Winning Photobooks, USA
Roberto Saviano on Valerio Spada, Facebook
Gomorrah Girl, 2nd edition, Photo Eye, Curated Selection, Santa Fe, USA
Le Monde, Coignet, Rémy. Gomorrah Girl, Valerio Spada, France
La Repubblica, Mutti, Roberto. Gomorrah Girl, Valerio Spada, Italia
Esquire, Gomorrah Girl by Valerio Spada, Russia
Enciclopedia della Moda, Spada Valerio, Mam-E - Italy
Fondazione Fashion Research Italy, Intervista a Valerio Spada. Olivieri, Giorgia. Italy
Cacciatore di Libri, Molti cercano l’eccezionale “Gomorrah Girl” di Valerio Spada. Italy
Pictures for Palestine, UK. Valerio Spada, Angel with a pistol, 2010.
Lars Eidinger by Valerio Spada, Re-Edition, UK 2021.
Further praise for Gomorrah Girl and I am nothing by Valerio Spada, Twin Palms Publishers
‘Gomorrah Girl by Valerio Spada, this is a book that I can really learn something from.’
Jim Goldberg, Magnum Photos
‘Spada’s book – self-published, stapled together, a brilliant combination of the roughhewn with the exquisite – is a memorial for a dead girl, a cri de coeur for vulnerable young women and a penetrating examination of the social ills resulting from a corrupt and rotten political system.’
Martin Parr / Gerry Badger, A History of Photobooks Vol. III, Phaidon
“At first glance, Gomorrah Girl may seem to be an unassuming even haphazard book, but as each page unfolds, the viewer is challenged by layers of meaning.”“This is a moving book of photographs and documents that one wants to return to repeatedly,” says Himes, (Head of International Photographs at Christie’s), describing what made the book a winner.
Darius Himes, Christie’s International Photographs, TIME Magazine
"I am nothing" by Valerio Spada is an impressive work because it shows us the silence, the penetration of crime in everyday life and our failure or inability to defend ourselves.
Roberto Saviano, Author
Excerpts from The Photobook: A History, Volume III - Phaidon Martin Parr and Gerry Badger on Valerio Spada
The Camorra is the Neapolitan Mafia, whose name was transliterated to Gomorrah for the well-known 2008 film by Matteo Garrone, and also for Valerio Spada’s book about the decaying neighbourhood of Scampia in Naples. Gomorrah Girl is a two-part, multi-level book, firstly about a crime and then about the social conditions in a city slum in which the Mafia is all pervasive and exploitative.
The crime was the death of the fourteen-year-old Annalisa Durante, who was caught in the crossfire of a Camorra-related shoot-out. Spada takes scans of the police report on the event: crime-scene photographs ballistic analysis and so on. There is a portrait of the victim’s background in the second edition of the book, which is on a different paper size, interleaved between the pages of police evidence.
This second edition concentrates upon social conditions in Scampia, and mainly upon the ‘Gomorrah’ girls, young women who are forced by poverty and crime to grow up before their time. Some of them end up as prostitutes working for the Mafia, some become addicts on drugs supplied by the Mafia and some become mothers at fourteen – or all three.
Spada’s book – self-published, stapled together, a brilliant combination of the rough-hewn with the exquisite – is a memorial for a dead girl, a cri de coeur for vulnerable young women and a penetrating examination of the social ills resulting from a corrupt and rotten political system.
Documentary is a wholly inadequate term to describe the multiplicity of strategies employed by these photographers. Story-telling is a better way of putting it, since many are willing to mix documentary with fiction and found photographs with their own work, not caring whether their books are ‘true’ as long as they tell thruths about their authors’ intent.
The term ‘conceptual documentary’ has become fashionable to
describe a more cerebral approach to both the complex problems of photographic representation and a certain type of photography examining society. It seems something of a nebulous term, as much to the arena in which the work is displayed – the art gallery – as to any fundamental character.
In short, the work is deemed ‘conceptual’ because the photographer – or rather, the artist – designates it as it such, often, it seems to denigrate the ‘documentary’ and boost the ‘conceptual’ part of the term.
Nevertheless, conceptual documentary refers to a kind of pre- planning and the setting up of a kind formal structure – frequently presentational – on the part of the artist. Perhaps ‘formalized documentary’ is a more accurate way to describe it. Many of the more interesting recent documentary books are in this vein. A complex, collaged approach has become the vogue, as in Jim Goldberg’s Open See (2009), Valerio Spada’s Gomorrah Girl (2011) or David Alan Harvey’s (Based on a true story) (2012). They can consist of the photographer’s own imagery and that of others, and might contain separate booklets with text or fac-simile objects. They might contain fabricated photographs (shades of Bill Brandt in the 1930s) as well as ‘slice of life’ photographs. And even if the shooting part of the process is relatively straightforward, photographers are certainly giving full reign to their imaginations at the book-making stage.
Francesco Zanot, MAST Curator - On Valerio Spada Exhibition "I am nothing"
'Gomorrah Girl' and 'I am nothing' are the main series produced by the young photographer Valerio Spada. Thanks to the first series, he made himself known throughout the world in 2011, while he has recently brought the second to a close thanks to the support of a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation in New York. Both revolve around the study of the most typical and yet obscure aspects of the major
Italian criminal organizations: the Neapolitan Camorra and the Sicilian Mafia. And yet these are not mere reportages, but combine truth and storytelling, diary and theatre, both candid and staged photography. They are cinematographic fiction raised to the level of judiciary truth. And vice versa.
Darius Himes, Christie’s International Photographs
“At first glance, Gomorrah Girl may seem to be an unassuming even haphazard book, but as each page unfolds, the viewer is challenged by layers of meaning.”
“This is a moving book of photographs and documents that one wants to return to repeatedly,” says Himes, (Head of International Photographs at Christie’s), describing what made the book a winner.
ALLIE HAEUSSLEIN - Director Pier 24 Photography Review for Photo Eye on Valerio Spada Gomorrah Girl
"Many of these girls will soon marry Camorristi... Many will bear children who will be killed... But for now they are just little girls in black. They weep for a friend... Annalisa is guilty of having been born in Naples. Nothing more, nothing less.”* —Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah
On March 27, 2004, fourteen-year-old Annalisa Durante was fatally shot in the back of her head outside her family home, caught in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting; the intended target, nineteen-year- old Camorra boss Salvatore Giulano, was accused of using the young
girl as a shield. Though Italian journalist Roberto Saviano had spent some time infiltrating the Camorra — the centuries old mafia-like organization that controls Naples — it was ultimately Annalisa's tragic death
that encouraged him to write his impassioned exposé, Gomorrah. Annalisa’s death is also the backbone of Valerio Spada’s Gomorrah Girl, an examination of the fraught relationship between female adolescence and the culture of violence defining present-day Naples.
Gomorrah Girl combines Neapolitan landscapes and portraits by Spada with rephotographed pages from the police investigation of Annalisa’s death and exists as two intermingled books. The worn pages of the police report — printed on something akin to newsprint — are interspersed with Spada’s own smaller, glossy photographs. You cannot view one without seeing the other. As a result, the lives of these young women and the landscape they occupy can only be viewed within the somber context of Annalisa’s death, producing a disquieting overtone regarding the future of the young women depicted.
Gomorrah Girl. By Valerio Spada. Twin Palms, 2014.
The crime scene photographs from Annalisa’s death are analytical, unsentimental and sterile — ballistics images, streets covered in evidence markers, approximations of bullet trajectories. They attempt to document and explain. And while they are necessary, there is a dark irony — no matter how much this crime is picked apart and the evidence is analyzed, it is ultimately an unsatisfactory explanation for a senseless event.
Spada’s images of young women are highly charged; there is a tension at play, a sense that something is amiss. Allusions to childhood — Hello Kitty, Daisy Duck, oversized headbands and plastic jewelry – appear duplicitous in the company of his subjects. They do not feel like children; they appear sexualized and desensitized to the violence that surrounds and subsumes them. The faces of these teenagers are viscerally hardened, projecting austere personas developed for survival.
A jarring picture that presents a telling metaphor for both the loss of innocence and the marginalization of women depicts a lone woman shooting up, completely ignored by the three men to her left. The photograph was taken in one of the most dangerous places in Italy known as “La Scuola” or “I Puffi” (The School or Smurfs House), a name that refers to the locale’s former life as a kindergarten. A place intended to educate and nurture youth falls victim to a culture with little room to experience childhood.
Gomorrah Girl. By Valerio Spada. Twin Palms, 2014.
Gomorrah Girl. By Valerio Spada. Twin Palms, 2014.
Gomorrah Girl. By Valerio Spada. Twin Palms, 2014.
Italy is often associated with the Coliseum, Pompeii, Tuscan hillsides and quaint cobbled roads. It is a struggle to conceive of the inhumane underbelly of a place we so blissfully romanticize. Hollywood portrayals of mafia-like organizations such as The Godfather or The Sopranos conceal the reality of these groups and their implications on society. Spada pulls the rose-colored glasses from our eyes, forcing us to consider how the intimidation, violence and machismo perpetuated by the Camorra reverberates through the fabric of a major city — the third largest municipality in Italy. The final photograph in Gomorrah Girl leaves us uneasy. The thirty-one year old “killer of Scampia” is positioned on a motorcycle in front of a series of apartment buildings, staring straight into the camera’s lens. His girlfriend, who did not want her portrait taken, is almost entirely obscured; all that is visible is a small sliver of her face and downcast gaze. Leaving us to wonder — what will become of these Gomorrah Girls?—ALLIE HAEUSSLEIN
Guggenheim Foundation Official Page Bio
Valerio Spada lives between New York and Milan. His work is exhibited, collected, and published internationally. On September 2011, Time magazine announced his first self-published book Gomorrah Girl to win the Grand Prize PBN Photography Book Now 2011 as Best Book of the Year, nominated by a panel of eleven international judges, among them Darius Himes, Steve McCurry, and Gerry Badger. Gomorrah Girl was nominated in various Best Book of the Year 2011 Lists, Joerg Colberg (USA), Rob Honstra (Holland), Marc Feustel (Eyecurious, France), Photo Eye with four nominations by John Gossage, Horacio Fernandez, Darius Himes, and Gerry Badger.
Source:
http://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/valerio-spada/
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Widewalls, Martinique, Elena. Documenting the Italian Mafia - Valerio Spada at Benrubi Gallery, Switzerland
Artsy, Valerio Spada. I am nothing. Benrubi Gallery, NYC, USA
i-D Magazine no.352 Adolescents in Marseille. Valerio Spada chronicles the lives of the teenagers of the melting pot port city of Marseille. Interview by Felix Petty. UK
TIME Magazine, TIME Special Preview: A guide to the best Spring/Summer Photobooks, USA
i-D Magazine, White, Ryan. How Valerio Spada captures the truth behind the headlines. UK
Sky Arte (TV) Valerio Spada e Magnum a Camera, Centro Nazionale per la Fotografia. Italy
The logging road, ...Trying to document my lost adolescence through the traumatic lives of others. A conversation with Valerio Spada, UK
i-D Magazine, Valerio Spada fotografa la mafia come nessun altro sa fare. Italy
Internazionale. La mafia raccontata da Valerio Spada in mostra a Torino. Italy
Vogue Italia. Italian Panorama. 15 best italian potographers shoots A/W 17/18. Italy
i-D Magazine, Valerio Spada's year in Photos, UK
Vogue Italia, Casadio, Mariuccia. Et maintenant la prochaine, Silvia Venturini Fendi on Karl Lagerfeld. Italy
The GAP. Worldwide Summer Campaign. Portrait of an American Summer. USA
Adweek. Gap found real people, not models, for its Summer Ads celebrating American diversity. USA
Ads of the World. The Gap by Valerio Spada, USA
British Journal of Photography. Seymour, Tom. The Italian Renaissance of Photography. UK
The Guardian. O’Hagan, Sean. The DIY Saviours of Photography. UK
Stern Crime. Ritter, Andrea. Es sind doch noch kinder – Valerio Spada. Germany (ADC Awarded Issue)
Enciclopedia della Moda, Spada Valerio - Italy
Dazed & Confused. Christiansen, Anne. The most exciting new photography books. Self Publish, Be Happy by Ceschel featuring Gomorrah Girl by Valerio Spada in the best photobooks self-published will launch at Foam Amsterdam and New York Book Art Fair. UK
Lomography. Laranjeira, Marta. An interview with Valerio Spada. UK
L'Oeil de la Photographie. Attinger, Irène. April selection best books Maison Européenne de la Photographie. France
SVA, NY. New books: Focus on Photography featuring Vivian Maier, Valerio Spada, Larry Fink, Larry Sultan, La Toya Ruby Frazier. USA
Book review, Haeusslein, Allie, Director Pier24 Photography, Photo-Eye, USA
Art Tribune, Valerio Spada I am nothing
Icon Magazine, La Fotografia ad Artissima, Italy
Camera, Torino, Valerio Spada, I am nothing Solo Exhibition, Italy
Lightwork, AIR, Valerio Spada, Collected prints
The New York Times IE, Tripoli, Gaia. An unfullfilled dream of escape, Gomorrah Girl by Valerio Spada. Page 2. USA
Playground, Muñoz, Alba. Gomorra Girl: así viven y mueren las adolescentes de la mafia, Brasil
Il Post, Le ragazze di Gomorrah, Italy
L'Oeil de la Photographie. Avedon, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Avedon talks to Valerio Spada, France
TIME Magazine, Lightbox, Best Spring/Summer 2014 PhotoBooks, USA
The Huffington Post. A haunting look at the Italian Mafia, Brunamonti, Filippo, USA
TVE2 (TV) Gomorrah Girl at Galeria Cero. TV Interview for La Aventura del Saber, Spain
TVE1 (TV) Lorenzo, Áurea. Valerio Spada, Gomorrah Girl, TV Interview for TeleDiario
RTVE (TV) Segura Albert, Luisa. Hacerse mayor conviviendo con la Camorra, Spain
Fraulen Magazine, Leinen, Lisa. Berlusconis Vermachtnis, Interview with Valerio Spada, Germany
The Photobook Review, Issue One, Ladd, Jeffrey. On Gomorrah Girl with Syb, Aperture Foundation, USA
Lens Magazine. Yue, Geng. On the strees in Naples, Valerio Spada interview, China
Hoolingan Magazine. Evtushenko, Yan. Valerio Spada interview on Gomorrah Girl, Russia
Peanut Butter Thoughts. Cheung, SGH. Valerio Spada – United Kingdom
ASX, American Suburb X. Rickard, Doug, Himes, Darius. Christie's Head of Photographs. PBN Winner: Gomorrah Girl, video, USA
TIME Magazine, Moakley, Paul. Gomorrah Girl: Best in Show, USA
IMSO, The land of the Camorrah, Five Award-Winning Photobooks, USA
Roberto Saviano on Valerio Spada, Facebook
Gomorrah Girl, 2nd edition, Photo Eye, Curated Selection, Santa Fe, USA
Le Monde, Coignet, Rémy. Gomorrah Girl, Valerio Spada, France
La Repubblica, Mutti, Roberto. Gomorrah Girl, Valerio Spada, Italia
Esquire, Gomorrah Girl by Valerio Spada, Russia
Enciclopedia della Moda, Spada Valerio, Mam-E - Italy
Fondazione Fashion Research Italy, Intervista a Valerio Spada. Olivieri, Giorgia. Italy
Cacciatore di Libri, Molti cercano l’eccezionale “Gomorrah Girl” di Valerio Spada. Italy
Pictures for Palestine, UK. Valerio Spada, Angel with a pistol, 2010.
Lars Eidinger by Valerio Spada, Re-Edition, UK 2021.