“Is it possible to photograph a past life?” Robert Polidori asks in his new book Unknown Prophecies, “To capture the unseen, the forgotten, the spectral residue of a soul’s former dwelling?” Polidori’s alluring yet haunting subject here is the abandoned churches of Naples, once glorious sites of Christian worship, today neglected and dilapidated relics. His approach is meticulous, his focus on the flaking frescoes, broken sculptures and crumbling bones and votive shrines that embody an evaporation of faith. Among these vestiges, the purgatory cult endures, a theology of intercession still murmuring in the margins of Naples’ fractured sanctuaries. As always with Polidori’s photos of deserted human environments, he does not simply catalogue what was, but poetically inquire into the cryptic traces that remain. These images are mediations on ghostly places where memory still clings to stone and shadow, psychic vessels that invite us to contemplate our own impermanence and the meanings of a tattered devotional past.
