Palermo Panorama is Mauro D’Agati’s (born 1968) love letter to his beloved hometown, a raw portrait that shows Palermo’s charm and grit in equal measure. The book comprises 13 chapters, each dedicated to a distinct series, which all grew organically over time to form a complex picture of the city.
Divided between two parts, 'Outskirts' and 'Downtown', Napule Shot represents a cross section of life in Naples. Chapter by chapter Mauro D'Agati tells the story of the city through a variety of characters and locations - a music manager, local singers, weddings, police operations, the heart of the city centre and the degraded eastern zone of Naples and its inhabitants. His photographs show the youngsters living there, the drugs and the beauty.
In the early 1970s the workers of the Fabrica Vanguardia Socialista, a steel smelting factory east of Havana, wrote to Fidel Castro about their need for apartments and houses. Out of this exchange a new city was born. Conceived by the same workers who would build it and live there, Alamar was planned as an example to the world of a socialist community. Ten years later, Alamar as we know it was completed. Built with passion by day and night, the result is excessive and amateurish. No two stairwells have the same height, nor are any of the walls square, and it extends over fifteen km2 between the Cojimar and Bacuranao rivers, the coast and the avenues that connect Matanzas and Varadero. At some point in history Alamar was no longer a symbol of some Utopian dream. It now resembles a gigantic installation in which an artist wanted to represent the chaos and all of the mistakes of this failed experiment. Mauro D’Agati’s photographs look at that moment when the dream faded. Was it during the Period Especial, the years after the collapse of the socialist system? Alamar continues in these pictures to represent a unique moment in the history of the Cuban revolution.
Palermo Unsung tells the story of singers, cantanti neomelodici, performing at the music festivals in the south of Italy and their frenzied public. It is a story of the common man, ragamuffin, culturally corrupt but human and paradoxically authentic. A 20 minute DVD, assembling pictures by Mauro D’Agati and soundtrack by Domenico Sciajno, gives a sense of the vibrant acoustics and emotions of these popular festivals.