To truly understand Fabio Donato, it is better to begin with a gesture, not with a photograph.

Naples, 1969, Teatro Mediterraneo. The Living Theatre is staging Paradise Now: Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s company, which in those years was dismantling the boundary between stage and audience. Donato is just over twenty, studying Architecture, politically active, and not yet a professional photographer. He enters the theatre, walks down the stairs and then — instead of taking a seat among the audience — does something no stage photographer would do: he steps onto the stage and turns towards the auditorium.

When the actors arrive, they position themselves between him and the audience, then lie down on the floor. Donato does not photograph the performance. He photographs the reversal of the performance: the new relationship between those who look and those who are looked at.

He would recount this many years later, and it remains one of the most important statements for understanding his work. He was not interested in simply documenting the performance, but in “recording this new relationship between the actors and the audience”. Having photographed not the show itself, but the theoretical idea that sustained it — he would later say — was the moment he understood he had become a photographer.

It is worth remembering that physical position: the photographer turned towards the auditorium rather than towards the stage. Because that gesture already contains the whole of his poetics.

Fabio Donato has rarely photographed the object in itself. Almost always, he has photographed the field of relationships that passes through it.

⸻

The exact opposite of silence

Fabio Donato’s photography is born from a radical trust in presence. It does not seek emptiness, does not isolate things until they become motionless emblems, does not remove the human figure in order to let space speak alone. On the contrary: it enters places when they are inhabited, crossed, charged with tension by bodies, voices, gazes, gestures.

His material is co-presence. Bodies, gazes, tensions, artists at work, a theatre audience, the precise moment in which two people share a space and something happens between them.

Donato never photographs only what stands before the lens. He photographs what happens between people, between bodies and space, between the artist and the audience, between the work and the context that brings it to life.

“Taking a photograph is not a technical act. A photograph is a story,” he has said. And it is precisely this narrative idea that makes his gaze so recognisable: the image not as pure recording, but as the telling of a relationship.

His interest is not the abstract eternity of forms, but the present at the very moment it takes shape. Donato pursues what happens before it vanishes: a posture, a conversation, a theatre rehearsal, an encounter, a threshold, a cultural scene at the exact instant in which it manifests itself.

It is no coincidence that Donato came from Architecture. In his images there is always a construction of space, a precise awareness of the internal forces within the frame. Even when he photographs the instant, the instant appears thought through. Nothing has the casual immediacy of a stolen photograph.

For this reason, his shots never give the impression that we have simply “stumbled into” them. They seem, rather, the result of an extremely attentive presence, almost choreographic in nature.

⸻

The witness to an unrepeatable season

The good fortune — and at the same time the risk — of an author such as Donato is that he was in the right place for more than half a century.

His archive, which comprises more than four hundred thousand frames, is one of the great visual diaries of cultural Naples from the 1960s to the 2000s. Almost everything passes through it: theatre, music, the visual arts, the international avant-gardes, a city changing its face.

There is Lucio Amelio and his gallery, the true epicentre of European contemporary art in Southern Italy. There are Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, who met in Naples in 1980 around the idea of that “new creativity of the Mezzogiorno” which, after the earthquake, would flow into the Terrae Motus collection. There are Hermann Nitsch, Vito Acconci, Marcel Marceau, Chet Baker, Pino Daniele, Roberto Benigni.

And then there is theatre.

Eduardo De Filippo, whom Donato followed from 1976 onwards, up to the photograph now displayed in the Naples metro. The first productions by Mario Martone. The young Toni Servillo and Antonio Neiwiller. The experimental Neapolitan theatre of the 1970s and 1980s at the very moment it was coming into being.

But here we must be careful not to make the easiest mistake: reducing Donato to a mere archivist of reality, a fortunate chronicler who “was there”.

That would be unfair and, above all, wrong.

Because the difference between a documentarian and an author does not lie in the event being photographed, but in the way it is seen. And Donato has never looked at an event simply for what it was. He has looked at it for the relational tension running through it.

Exactly as he did that evening on the stage of the Teatro Mediterraneo


 

Two tracks, one single idea of photography

Donato himself has often described his work as divided into two parallel paths.

On the one hand, the photographer of artists, theatre, music, the cultural scene. On the other, his more personal images — those he referred to, in a beautiful phrase, as his “poems”.

These include La Città, the long urban research project begun in the 1970s; the journey to India in 1970, from which he returned having photographed not monuments or landscapes, but bare feet; marginal spaces, thresholds, interiors crossed by light.

It would be easy to read these two tracks as separate: the professional and the author, the commissioned photographer and the visual poet.

But the separation is far less clear-cut than it appears.

In both cases, the same idea of photography is at work: not simply stopping what can be seen, but making visible what normally escapes us.

In his portraits of artists, he seeks the moment in which the work takes form. This is why he rarely photographs them posed: what interests him is thought as it happens, not the public image of the artist.

And his urban images do the same with the city. They search for the point of passage between inside and outside, between private and collective, between individual gesture and public space.

For Donato, photography is not used to freeze the world. It is used to reveal the invisible relationships that hold it together.

⸻

A figure still waiting to be truly reread

It must be said honestly: Fabio Donato is an author who has been studied less than he deserves.

There have been exhibitions, catalogues, interviews, archival materials, but there is still no major critical rereading capable of fully placing him within the history of Italian photography in the second half of the twentieth century. And yet few authors have narrated, with comparable continuity, the relationship between art, urban space and cultural life in the Mezzogiorno.

Perhaps also because Donato belongs to a category of photographers who are difficult to simplify.

Too cultured to be reduced to a reporter. Too immersed in events to be merely a conceptual photographer. Too interested in people to take refuge in pure form.

His photography lives precisely on that threshold.

And perhaps that is what makes it feel so contemporary today.

In an age in which the image has become above all self-representation — the continuous display of the self, narcissistic surface, performed identity — Donato represents almost the opposite gesture. A gaze turned towards others, towards the scene, towards the work of others, towards the collective construction of a cultural atmosphere.

He spent his life facing the audience while everyone else was looking at the stage.

And that is precisely why he left us one of the truest portraits of that stage, and of that audience.

⸻

Fabio Donato (Naples, 1947). Photographer, lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples.

.flag { width: 50px !important; max-width: 50px !important; height: auto !important;}h1, h2 { font-weight: 700;}

Future Social Media Will Understand Who You Are: How AI Is Shifting Marketing From Content to Identity

In short. Social platforms are moving from analyzing content to modeling the identity of the people who create it. This shifts marketing from a logic of content to one of relationship, and redefines the social media manager’s role: less technical executor, more cultural director of digital presence. Below: why it’s happening, what the data shows, and the hidden risk.

For years we described social networks as enormous content distributors: a machine tasked with deciding which videos to show us, which posts to read, which photos deserved attention and which should vanish into the noise of the scroll. We publish, the algorithm decides. Within this logic, social media marketing learned a precise craft: the best times to post, the ideal video length, the words that lift engagement, the hooks that hold attention in the first three seconds.

We learned to build content. But the ground is shifting beneath our feet, and it’s still talked about far too little.

Are social platforms really starting to understand who posts?

Yes. Recommender systems no longer analyze only the individual piece of content — they have begun to model the people who produce it. This isn’t a prediction; it’s already in the work of those who build these systems.

A 2021 paper by LinkedIn engineers (Feedback Shaping: A Modeling Approach to Nurture Content Creation) explicitly proposes an approach to predict how user feedback incentivizes creators, on the premise that a platform’s health depends as much on nurturing those who produce as on satisfying those who consume. Other academic studies on YouTube, TikTok and similar platforms describe a “dual influence”: recommendation shapes the preferences of viewers and, at the same time, pushes creators to constantly adjust their style to better capture an audience.

In the middle of all this sits a structural detail that changes everything: in the pure algorithmic model, follower count matters less and less, because each post is optimized on its own, based on topic and perceived quality. Creators lose predictability and control over their reach. The platform, in exchange, accumulates an ever finer profile of who you are as a communicator.

It’s a major shift. Until yesterday the algorithm asked: might this content interest you? Tomorrow the question looks more like: does this person resemble you? Do they reassure you? Do they make you feel understood? The center of gravity moves from content to relationship.

Why is polished content no longer a competitive advantage?

Because it has become replicable at near-zero cost. When anyone can generate spectacular images, text and professional video with AI, visual quality stops distinguishing one brand from another. What remains scarce — and therefore valuable — is the human element that can’t be automated.

In recent years content production has been democratized to the extreme. For a decade brands chased flawless feeds and ultra-filtered communication; today that perfection wearies us, not because it’s wrong, but because it no longer costs anything to achieve. What doesn’t automate easily — a personal tone, irony born from context, cultural sensitivity, even the imperfections that signal a real presence behind the screen — becomes the true differentiator again.

How do platforms actually “read” an identity?

Through affective computing: the automatic recognition of emotional states and relational signals. These systems analyze, in combination, facial expressions, voice intonation, speech rhythm and text sentiment, and the Emotion AI market is projected to grow strongly through 2035, driven mainly by customer experience applications.

This is where the two dynamics fuse: platforms are learning to read precisely the human signals that are becoming scarce. The accuracy figures vendors present are high, but should be treated with caution — they are self-reported, and independent research flags significant limits around dataset bias and model transparency.

The takeaway for communicators is both simple and demanding: the goal of platforms will no longer be only to hold users in front of a screen, but to build perceived compatibility between digital identities. Less advertising square in which to interrupt attention, more relational environment in which to match people.

What are the risks of social media that “understands who you are”?

The two main risks are emotional surveillance and the simulation of authenticity. The first concerns privacy: emotional data is among the most intimate that exists. The second is subtler: if authenticity becomes the rewarded trait, AI will learn to simulate it.

It’s only honest to pause on the uncomfortable side of the thesis, because an analysis that only celebrates itself isn’t credible.

On the ethical front, researchers are explicit: the opaque collection of emotional data erodes trust rather than building it. It’s no accident that special protections are being debated, and the European AI Act bans emotion recognition precisely in the most sensitive domains — workplace and education — while permitting it elsewhere.

The second objection strikes the heart of the argument. If authenticity becomes a target to optimize for, it predictably becomes something AI will learn to reproduce. Recent literature speaks openly of the “compassion illusion” and of “pseudo-intimacy”: machines that perform empathy ever more convincingly without feeling it. The concrete risk, for marketing, is a race in which manufactured authenticity drives out the real kind — exactly as visual perfection stopped meaning anything once it became free.

This doesn’t dismantle the thesis: it makes it more serious. Because if the authentic is simulable, then the competitive advantage lies not in seeming human, but in being human in ways that are hard to replicate: lived experience, point of view, accountability for what you say. And this is exactly where the role of professionals, rather than shrinking, rises.

What will the social media manager of the future do?

They will look less and less like a content manager and more like a cultural director of digital presence: someone able to interpret contemporary languages, build credible identities, read social shifts and give coherence to a narrative. Less execution, more vision.

Every technological revolution brings the same initial fear: that technique will replace human skill. It happened with photography, desktop publishing, web design, social media itself. And every time, history took another path: tools automate repetitive operations and, precisely because of that, raise the value of cultural, strategic and creative skills. A system can generate thousands of images, but it has no experience of the world, doesn’t truly know the social context, doesn’t fully grasp the irony, the desire, the cultural tension of an era. It can produce forms; meaning remains a human responsibility.

The same holds for education: for a long time, learning communication meant learning the tools, but now that tools are accessible to everyone, what makes the difference is design thinking. Understanding why a message works. Why an identity generates trust. Why some languages create belonging and others only noise.

The conclusion: a deeply human paradox

There’s a paradox in all this, and it’s the most interesting part. Artificial intelligence, by pushing platforms to measure emotions, is bringing marketing back toward something profoundly human: the quality of relationships. For years we spoke of users. Slowly we return to speaking of people — with all the ambivalence that entails.

The revolution ahead isn’t more artificial social media, but social media that will need professionals more capable of interpreting and defending what makes human communication authentic, precisely as machines learn to imitate it.

Frequently asked questions

Do social networks analyze people or just content?
Historically, recommender systems optimized for the preferences of content consumers. Recent research shows an evolution: platforms increasingly model creators too — their style and the relational signals they transmit — shifting the focus from the individual piece of content to the identity of the person publishing it.

What is affective computing in social media?
It’s the automatic recognition of emotional states and relational signals from facial expressions, voice, speech rhythm and text sentiment. Applied to social media and marketing, it aims to measure perceived empathy and the sense of closeness a person communicates, not just engagement metrics.

Will AI replace social media managers?
No. AI automates production and execution, but raises the value of cultural, strategic and creative skills. The role evolves toward that of a “cultural director” of digital presence, responsible for vision, identity and narrative coherence.

Is it legal for platforms to analyze users’ emotions?
It depends on the context. The European AI Act bans emotion recognition in domains such as the workplace and education, but permits it in others. A privacy debate remains open, because emotional data is considered among the most sensitive.

Photography desperately needs to return to the people, away from the often dusty dynamics of institutional circuits. The Neapolitan response to this need is called #Photographic Invasion, a completely independent and self-managed festival that this Sunday, May 24, 2026, will transform the city into a massive collective darkroom. No sponsorships, no entrance fees, no white-walled galleries: the visual scene reclaims urban space.

The spirit of the project is both provocative and poetic. For an entire day, participating photographers will showcase their works using decidedly unconventional supports. We will see large prints hanging from the balconies of historic buildings as if they were sheets drying in the sun, prints worn by creatives walking through the alleys like sandwich men, and digital screens temporarily integrated among shop windows.

A visual short circuit that will compel passersby to stop, look, and question the power of images.

A new way to create visual community

For those involved in communication and visual arts, this event represents a spontaneous case study of great interest. It demonstrates how the community of photographers feels the need to reclaim the medium, transforming Naples into the capital of street photography, understood not only as a genre but as a physical space for sharing.

The organizers' goal is clear: to democratize the gaze, break down barriers between author and viewer, and demonstrate that visual culture lives and breathes especially where it meets the everyday lives of people.

If you are in Naples this Sunday, let yourself be swept away by the flow of images. It will be a wonderful opportunity to observe closely how photography can redefine, even if only for a few hours, the visual identity of an entire territory.

On Mimmo Jodice, and on why his slowness concerns us now more than it did then

⸻

There are photographers who are measured by the number of images they have made, and photographers who are measured by the ones they chose not to take. Mimmo Jodice belonged to the second kind, now almost extinct.

“I do not have an easy shutter,” he used to say. Coming from anyone else, it might have sounded like affectation; in his case it was a statement of method, almost a profession of faith. He would return to the same place several times, wait for the light to change, observe the way a shadow shifted by a few centimetres over the course of an afternoon. Then, perhaps, he would photograph.

This stubbornness — because stubbornness is what it was — is the key to rereading him today, a few months after his death in Naples on 28 October 2025, at the age of ninety-one. Not as yet another “master of black and white” to be turned into a commemorative formula, but as one of the last great European photographers to have made slowness an aesthetic and moral position.

It is a thesis that asks to be defended, not merely proclaimed. Let us try.

⸻

Time as matter, not as theme

It is often said that Jodice “stopped time”. He said it himself, with that beautiful and slightly threatening phrase: time must be stopped before it notices and takes revenge. But the phrase, through constant repetition, has almost been emptied of meaning. It is worth taking seriously and asking how time can be stopped in a photograph, because that is where Jodice truly parts company with almost everyone else.

He did not stop it by choosing motionless subjects. He stopped it within the very body of the image.

His decision to print by hand, to the very end, on silver-gelatin baryta paper is often filed away as artisanal nostalgia: the charming resistance of an old master against the digital tide. That is a lazy reading. For Jodice, analogue printing was not a mannerism: it was a position taken on time.

A file tends to erase its own age; a silver-gelatin print, by contrast, preserves it. The material that sustains it — the paper, the silver, the black slowly deposited during development — ages together with the world it represents. Jodice did not simply photograph ruin: he produced images that seem to belong to ruin itself.

His prints do not represent suspended time; they contain it.

That is why Jodice’s photographs, when seen in person, do not seem simply printed: they seem to have surfaced. They emerge from the black like relics from water. It is an effect achieved not through the subject, but through the hand.

⸻

One coherence, not two periods

Critical shorthand often divides Jodice in two.

On one side there is the politically engaged photographer of the 1970s: cholera, psychiatric hospitals, working-class outskirts, the devotees of Chi è devoto (1974), the book made with texts by Roberto De Simone and a foreword by Carlo Levi. On the other, the metaphysical photographer of the 1980s and 1990s: empty squares, statues, seas, the suspended cities of Vedute di Napoli.

Maturation, people say. An ascent towards the universal.

It is a convenient narrative and, I believe, a partial one.

Because one only has to really look at the images from the politically engaged years to realise that the gaze is already entirely there. Jodice was not seeking the event, he was not constructing the rhetoric of denunciation, he was not turning poverty into spectacle. He was seeking the silent presence, the tension that inhabits a room an instant before or after something happens. Even in the crowded alleys of the Sanità or in the popular festivals of Campania, his gaze already seemed to be working by subtraction.

The social photographer of the 1970s and the metaphysical poet of the 1980s are not two different men. They are the same eye which, over time, learned to remove: first the anecdote, then the chronicle, and finally the human figure itself.

The abandonment of the social, then, is not a betrayal. It is a progressive act of subtraction carried out always in the same direction.

Jodice spent his life polishing away from the image everything he did not consider essential, until only space, light and time remained.

The deserted squares of Vedute di Napoli are the logical consequence of the crowded alleys of Chi è devoto: in both cases, what matters is not who is there, but what remains.

⸻

Naples as method, de Chirico as alibi

The name of Giorgio de Chirico inevitably returns whenever Jodice is discussed. The squares, the shadows, the arches, the statues: the metaphysical lineage is clear, and Jodice never denied it.

But if left at that, the comparison risks becoming reductive.

De Chirico invented imaginary cities; Jodice photographed Piazza del Plebiscito, which truly exists, and forced it to become unreal while remaining perfectly itself. De Chirico’s metaphysics is born of invention; Jodice’s is born of subtraction.

His Naples is never a theatrical set, nor postcard folklore. It is a method of knowledge.

The city mattered to him because it is one of the places in Europe where the present rests most visibly upon the past, where time does not seem to flow but to settle. To photograph Naples, then, meant photographing stratification itself: the proof that time does not disappear, it accumulates.

The series Anamnesi is perhaps the clearest formulation of this idea. The faces of the statues in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples are photographed as though they were returning the gaze of the person looking at them. They do not seem like artefacts: they seem like memories resurfacing.

⸻

Slowness as diagnosis

Here lies the reason why it is still worth writing about Jodice — and doing so seriously.

Jodice worked for sixty years within a world that produced relatively few images and made them last. He died in a world that produces billions of them every day and makes almost none of them endure.

His slowness, which in his own time might have seemed a matter of character or temperament, now appears for what it was: a diagnosis.

Because the point is not that we take too many photographs. It is that we no longer look at any of them.

The contemporary image has become an act of scrolling: something we pass through, not something we inhabit. Jodice spent his life demonstrating the opposite. That an image can be a place in which to stop, and that stopping has become one of the most difficult and necessary things of all.

His photographs ask for the time we no longer have. And that is precisely why they still manage to give it back to us.

They are images against the current: they push in the opposite direction to the one in which everything today drags us.

There is a word that often returned in his vocabulary: waiting. But in Jodice, waiting had nothing passive about it. It derives from the Latin ad-tendere: to stretch towards. To wait for the light meant to build a tension towards what was not yet visible.

In this sense, more than a photographer of the past, Jodice was a photographer of our missed present. He showed us the way of looking we were losing at the very moment we were losing it.

Not, then, the last master of an outdated technique, but one of the last artists to have believed that the world, if observed long enough, will eventually reveal itself.

⸻

A legacy that continues to look back at us

In recent years, Jodice’s international consecration had become definitive: the Louvre, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the major Italian retrospectives. But institutional recognition is not the point. What matters is that his work continues to exert an underground influence on entire generations of photographers and visual artists.

Not least because his lesson was never merely technical.

Jodice taught a way of standing before things. The patience to wait for light to reveal what was already there. The conviction that looking does not mean consuming images, but allowing images slowly to consume us.

Beside him, throughout his life, was his wife Angela — a graduate in English literature, his interlocutor and companion in every choice. Where there was Mimmo, there was Angela. This too, in the end, belongs to his idea of duration.

Jodice stopped time, as he promised. And time, at least with him, did not take revenge. For once, it merely allowed itself to be looked at.

⸻

Domenico “Mimmo” Jodice (Naples, 29 March 1934 – Naples, 28 October 2025).

A major ILAS event, a free seminar with
GAETANO GRIZZANTI


 

Elements of Brand Identity

During the seminar, Gaetano Grizzanti will outline the essential concepts and strategies for developing a modern brand identity. The seminar aims to provide students with the necessary foundations to navigate the complex world of branding, offering practical and applicable insights.

 

Students will have the opportunity to learn directly from a renowned expert, through a concise presentation of cognitive models.

Gaetano Grizzanti is the author of "Brand Identikit, the textbook for Ilas students

GAETANO GRIZZANTI

Identity Designer and Brand Advisor, designer of brands and corporate identity. He lives and works in Milan. Since 1988, he has been dedicated to teaching, instructing in various institutes and universities. Alongside, he conducts courses, conferences, and seminars for conferences and companies.

Since 1986, he has founded Univisual, a professional studio specialized in brand strategy and identity system development, providing consulting and projects for industries, service companies, and institutions, such as Aruba, Bancomat, Comune di Milano, Gruppo Banco BPM, Grandi Navi Veloci, Imetec, Menarini, Mondadori, Pampers, Perini Navi, Rcs, Regione Liguria, Salmoiraghi & Viganò, Telethon, UniCredit.

www.univisual.com

The design of Univisual has been awarded numerous Italian and international recognitions.

www.identitymarks.it

Grizzanti is an Expert Witness at the Court of Milan in Trademark matters and from 2009 to 2012, he was a member of the National Board of Aiap (Italian Association for Visual Communication Design).

In 2013, he established the Campo Grafico Association, named after the historic magazine published from 1933 to 1939, with the aim of preserving its cultural and documentary memory.

www.campografico.org

In 2011, he published the book “Brand Identikit - Transforming a Brand into a Mark" (Fausto Lupetti Editore), now in its fifth edition as of 2020.

http://www.brand-identikit.it/book