Marco Imperatore’s Photographs of Bodies, Fire and Desire

There are landscapes that become part of you before you have the language to describe them. For Italian photographer Marco Imperatore, Mount Vesuvius belongs to this category. Imperatore grew up in Naples, where Vesuvius is woven into the landscape of everyday life, a constant presence on the eastern edge of the Bay of Naples. The photographer was introduced to both his medium and the myriad possibilities of landscape as subject matter by his mother, who, during his childhood, would often photograph her hometown, Pozzuoli. Through her, Imperatore tells AnOther, he came to learn that “landscape is never simply a backdrop. It is a living subject, capable of informing the way we experience the world.” 

This idea lies at the heart of Not All Venuses Are Born from the Sea, Imperatore’s ongoing photo series, which will soon go on show at Il Giardino dell’Arte – a cultural garden founded by sculptor Salvatore Russo on the island of Stromboli, which sits at the foot of another volcano, also named Stromboli. Curated by Yeocheva Gabbay, the two met by chance while having a drink at the island’s infamous bar, La Libreria. The series sees the photographer pay regular visits to Vesuvius and Stromboli, two volcanoes that embody very different ideas of time: while Vesuvius is famously dormant, its stillness contains the possibility of eruption; Stromboli, by contrast, is continuously active, its transformations and eruptions part of the island’s daily rhythm. 

Imperatore often includes female figures in the photographs – Venus-like women that appear against volcanic terrain, immersed in blue water, moving through vegetation or resting among black lava. They are draped in fabric and pearls, submerged, standing, looking, disappearing. Unlike familiar portrayals of the Roman goddess emerging pristine from a bed of sea foam, Imperatore’s tattered Venus is born from fire – “I wanted to question whether that was the only possible origin,” he explains. Exposed to the elements, his Venus belongs to a place that can change without warning. Elsewhere in the series, the female form gives way to melted candles, ash, shells and fragments of organic matter – small records of the effects of time and the elements.

Indeed, at every stage of the series, the concept of time is central. Imperatore shoots the images on film, introducing a deliberate distance between making and seeing. This is part of his photographic philosophy, he notes – the time it takes to process the image allows it to exist independently of the instant in which it was made. “Projects need time,” he says. “I believe some ideas can only be fully understood after years have passed. In that sense, time isn’t an obstacle, it’s an essential part of the creative process.”

The same is true of the project itself, which Imperatore began in 2018 and has returned to over successive summers. “I spent a great deal of time walking and observing,” the photographer recalls. “I wanted to understand how the light changed, how the wind reshaped the landscape, and what kind of relationship existed between people and these places. I gradually began to recognise connections between the landscape, mythology and the people I was photographing,” he says. He was not “looking for models to simply perform the role of Venus”, nor did he want to position them as decorative figures against an exotic backdrop. The women are participants in the environment – bodies with their own histories and relationships to the places in which they are photographed.

That’s not to say that traditional depictions of the goddess of love, beauty, desire and fertility did not inform the work. From the Renaissance onwards, the myth of Venus has provided generations of artists with a vehicle for representing the idealised female nude. Along with his collaborator, the creative director and stylist Mariaelena Morell, Imperatore has worked to develop a visual language that draws on this history and its symbolism. 

But Imperatore’s Venus proposes a different understanding of fertility. It is not limited to procreation, nor is it simply synonymous with feminine beauty. Like the volcanic landscape, where destruction creates the conditions for new life, fertility becomes a force of regeneration. For Imperatore, Venus embodies what he describes as the vitality shared by bodies and the earth: “The persistence of Eros, the impulse that draws life toward life.” In Not All Venuses Are Born from the Sea, desire appears less as an object to be looked at than as an energy moving through the world. It exists between water and skin, heat and stone, the human figure and the landscape.

Imperatore’s hope is that viewers will leave the exhibition with a renewed appreciation for mythology’s continued resonance. “Myths don’t belong only to the past,” he says. “They can help us understand the present.” In Stromboli, old stories encounter a landscape that is still changing. Likewise, in his retelling of the Venus myth, Imperatore does not attempt to resolve the goddess into a new fixed image; instead, he opens her up to another origin, another body, another landscape, conjuring a figure in a constant state of becoming. The series remains ongoing, too: Imperatore hopes eventually to publish the work as a book, allowing the photographs to enter another form of circulation and another kind of time. 

Not All Venuses are Born From the Sea is open 22–30 August at Il Giardino dell’Arte in Italy.