Gomorrah Girl


  • Photographer
    Valerio Spada
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Date of Photograph
    2009-2011
  • Technical Info
    Analog medium format / digital
Story

A documentary about adolescence, choices and chances in a land of Camorrah (the name of the Mafia in Naples).

On March 27th, 2004, Annalisa Durante, at the age of 14, was killed in Forcella, a Naples area under the Giuliano clan’s egemony. Annalisa and two of her friends were in front of her father’s small store, leaning on a car, talking with Salvatore Giuliano, a young Camorrah boss, then 22. Everything that happens next will take only seconds but will change many lives forever. Two killers on a motorcycle and uncovered faces pop out of a side street and open fire. Their aim is to kill Guiliano, who hides behind the car and starts to shoot back at them. The two friends of Annalisa find a getaway on the rigth side in a small street, while Annalisa runs in the opposite direction, where the killers are driving away. One of the three bullets fired by Giuliano hits Annalisa in the head, immediately she falls lifeless to the ground.
This photographic journey starts from Annalisa's father, Giovanni Durante. Since that day he brings breakfast with milk at 9 every morning to his daughter's grave. Annalisa was buried along with her cell phone, which was her father's wish, since she used to call him five times per day, every day.

There is a magnificent strength in Giovanni Durante's will to stay in Forcella, trying to right the wrongs of one of the most dangerous areas in Naples. A similar determination can be found in the teachers at the Liceo Elsa Morante, in the Scampia neighborhood, in their daily effort to educate and keep the girls of Scampia off the streets and from a destiny that seems to have been written long before these girls were born. Generations of wrong choices and mistakes that have ripped families and whole communities in this region apart.

Portraits of girls whose destinies can still change if not the destiny of the area in which they are growing up. In general, "Gomorrah Girl" shows the problems of becoming a woman in a dangerous, crime ridden area. Adolescence is almost denied, at 9 they dance, move and make themselves up as tv personalities and dream to become one of them. At 13 or 14, very often, they become mothers, skipping the adolescence which is lived fully everywhere else in Italy.

Annalisa Durante's necklace around the neck of Giovanni Durante, girls at the Liceo in Scampia, families inside Le Vele, the notorious neighborhood of Scampia is considered one of the most dangerous in Italy for its central position in one of the highest drug trafficking and dealing in Europe, where Camorra business has its core and main income by selling drugs of excellent quality at the lowest price. Annalisa's homicide evidence, like the bullet extracted from her skull, are all points that, once connected, become a large and unique picture of the desolation which is equal only to the hope, not only for Naples but maybe for all of today's Italy.

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