David Alan Harvey

As with many photographers who works as ‘street’ documentarians, I was influenced early by the visual aesthetic of Eugene Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson. I was also introduced to the powerful magazine essays by W. Eugene Smith and John Loengard. These photographers worked in black and white and so did I.

Eventually, I evolved into the realm of color photography, but kept in my spirit the “freestyle” intensity of pioneering colleagues. For me, strong individual pictures connected by a theme became by goal. I realized an essay can come from years of work as in Sebastiao Salgado’s ‘Workers’, while Gilles Peres’ ‘Telex Iran’ and Mary Ellen Mark’s ‘Falkland Road’ were derived from just a few weeks of work.

National Geographic has become for me what Life was for Gene Smith. After Life folded, I could see that the National Geographic was to become my resource for the future. As a Magnum member, I know it is always a struggle to balance ones’ personal growth and style with the editorial needs of a mass audience publication. I have embraced this potential conflict, and transformed it into fuel to empower my work. I am a student and I learn on a daily basis from my subjects and my professional colleagues. This symbiotic relationship enables me to make photographs which serve the editors as well as add to my own personal body of work.

My personal epic on Spanish culture, an ongoing project, which has spanned more than fifteen years, was exhibited first in Perpignan back in 1994. However, I find it refreshing to take a ‘break’ and do smaller projects as here in Naples. Naples is pure theater. This Greek-Spanish-French and finally Roman city of one million, often scorned by the rest of Italy and cut off from the normal tourist routes, fed me with a short but intense view of this part of Italy. These photographs do not attempt to define Naples, but are vignettes of people in a quixotic city and a page out of my personal diary.

David Alan Harvey, May 1998