City of Secrets is Jed Fielding's first monograph. These extraordinary images, the product of twenty years spent photographing in the streets of Naples, constitute a major body of work by an important American photographer. Fielding's unforgettable portraits are illuminated by an insightful essay contributed by photography writer Nan Richardson. Naples itself is beautifully detailed by Shirley Hazzard, who provides a historic and poetic context for Fielding's work. But at the heart of the book are the photographs themselves. From the essay by Nan Richardson: "A strange light inhabits the photographs of Jed Fielding, a pale gray that one associates with place. It has the cool texture of marble. It preserves a certain formality, even if the camera lens allows little personal space. It has a hallowing glow as it lights his subjects, denizens of the mean streets of Naples, with indigent pride. It gilds their disenfranchisement, their dispossession in the ghetto, with a strong sense of energy, tribal power, physicality, self-possession. Even if the accouterments of life in Naples are spartan, the light is triumphantly not. Elegant, voluptuous, vibrant, it registers joy in life as Fielding photographs limbs, faces, gestures, the bold stare of infants, the withered faces of age, the laughter of children.This is a book, then, about people, and only incidentally about place. In choosing Italy as his destination and inner-city Naples as a vocation...the photographer's intention was direct and premeditated: to get closer to people and, ultimately, to achieve what Fielding calls 'a quick, collaborative encounter'." Implying his presence in their gaze, he lets the picture selflessly describe them. And in these photographs the conscious source of their energy is the essential bond of connecting--the interaction between the photographer and his subjects.

"Bold in design, these photographs deal with intimacies: the tender touching of persons, the proud display of bodies, the looking-at-you. Manner and matter compete and are in disturbing tension. Seemingly brash, Jed's pictures exude vigor and joyfulness."

—Aaron Siskind, Providence, Rhode Island, 1989

"Jed Fielding is from the old school: a photographer with vision and technique. I've been to Naples twice in my lifetime; once by ship, and, even more lastingly, through Jed Fielding's astonishing images."

—W. M. Hunt/Dancing Bear, collector and curator,
New York

"Among the most memorable lessons of Jed Fielding's studies of life in...Italy is the reminder that despite the endless contemporary talk of global oneness, human beings are still local, bound to places very different from other places. Blessed with a terrific natural feel for what the camera lens can uncover and record, he has affirmed that the inhabitants of Naples handle their food, hold their babies, sit next to their relatives, and even display their badges of puberty, in manners unlike the ways of their counterparts in the urban centers of the United States. Yet another paradox: these very dissimilarities only tighten the bond of humanity with the people we call foreigners. They are sometimes more beautiful than we are, sometimes less, now and then smarter, occasionally dumber. Call it Jed Fielding's doctrine of common clay."

—Franz Shulze, The City: Harbor of Humanity (Chicago: The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, 1997)