Mario Amura. Fotografie 1995–1999 brings together an early body of black-and-white photographs made on film between 1995 and 1999, before Amura began his cinematography studies under Giuseppe Rotunno at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome.

Moving through Naples and Southern Italy, Amura photographs children, elderly people, fishermen, women and marginal figures encountered along the way. Rather than conventional reportage, the images form a quiet exploration of human presence, memory and the cultural landscape of the South. The photographer remains deliberately unobtrusive, allowing gestures, faces and everyday details to emerge without spectacle or idealisation.

The book is framed by two critical texts. In his introduction, Lorenzo Cuna identifies an ethical dimension in Amura’s photography, centred on the encounter with the Other and the vulnerability created by the photographic gaze. In her afterword, Serenella Iovino reads the work in relation to Southern Italian culture, neorealism and documentary photography, describing a form of “eventless documentary” in which the photographer withdraws and allows the subjects to exist on their own terms.

Published in Milan in 1999 by Galleria d’Arte Memoli, the book documents the first phase of Mario Amura’s photographic research.