Saluti da PINETAMARE.

Photographs by Salvatore Santoro.

Self-Published, 2013. 184 pp., 88 color illustrations, 8½x11½".

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2013 by:

Elisa Medde

The story
“Saluti da PINETAMARE” is a photobook that begins with this sentence:

July 1989.
It has been the first time since I heard a Kalashnikov shooting.
And it was against people.
That night, we would have never imagined we had to run away,
looking back embracing some beers.

I developed this work in the areas along the 54 km of the National Road n. 7 Quater “Domitiana” in the cities of Licola, Lago Patria, Ischitella, Villaggio Coppola-Pinetamare Castel Volturno, Pescopagano, Mondragone, crossing the Mediterranean coast in the provinces of Naples and Caserta (Italy).

These are the places for the summer holidays of my childhood, 25-30 years ago. At that time they were still pretty wild, small building, with nature still strong. But in those years the legal and illegal building boom began and filled with cement throughout the area, making it a symbol of unauthorized building and environmental destruction.

Illegality called illegality and over the time the area is further degraded until today to be one of the main drug marketplace of the center-south Italy, headquarters of the Nigerian mafia (that born in Castel Volturno and not in Nigeria), the commercial area of Mafia Casalese and Neapolitan Camorra and big area for illegal waste. This book is not a journalistic document about a single event or one theme, but it’s a personal project about my home, the place of my childhood. It’s about what happened to these places. I tried to explore the changes into the places of my childhood memories by making them collide with reality. The reality is that the direction taken by mankind, is far from reaching a better future which would leave our children better off their parents.

The book
These photographs were taken between 2009 and 2011. During 2012 I work on editing all the material collected, approximately 12,000 photographs. The prototype of the book was ready in April 2012 and printing the first edition at the end of October 2012.
Because of the kind of book “object” is out of the mainstream publishing, I decided to selfpublishing it. This way, obviously, involves myself to covering the funds necessary to produce the work. The book was developed in order to give space to photographs of the past that overlap, almost shrieking, photographs today. In the book, there are small sized inserts that include photographs of my childhood and childhood of other people living in the area for years.

The paper used is atypical for photo books. It is high quality paper with touch-sense like a diary. It is uncoated. It is not very thick. The cover is “tear-resistant” jacket: in practice is a folded great photo that gives the cover image.

This book has been selected in the top ten, of five hundred thirty-three, of the international competition for prototypes and photo books: the DUMMY AWARD 2012, as part of the International Photobook Festival in Kassel.

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