Between 1987 and 2014—always “after the summer”—Bernard Plossu moved across Italy’s smaller islands with the persistence of someone returning to a place rather than discovering it for the first time. Stromboli, Capri, Elba, Capraia, Favignana, Giglio, Levanzo, Ischia, Procida, Filicudi, Vulcano, Panarea, Alicudi: in the volume published in 2024 by Éditions Textuel these names do not function as picturesque destinations but as coordinates in a long-term relationship with landscape. More than three hundred black-and-white photographs form a compact yet breathing body of work, shaped over nearly three decades. The journey here is not conquest or spectacle; it is repetition, attention, and duration.
The story began in 1987 with a stay in Stromboli, made possible by the French Institute in Naples. The following year Plossu returned to the Aeolian Islands, settling for a period in Lipari with his wife, photographer François Nuñez, and their son. From that initial anchorage the itinerary gradually widened, extending to other islands without a rigid plan, guided instead by circumstance and by the simple act of walking. What emerged over time was less a project than a practice—an ongoing dialogue with wind, salt air, harsh light, and the measured rhythm of insular life.
Human presence in these images is sparse and often peripheral. The island is never a backdrop; it is a living structure within which people appear as fleeting signs. Plossu avoids the climactic moment. He works in the interval, in what might be called the infra-ordinary, where apparent banality reveals its density. A sun-bleached wall, an empty road, a figure crossing the frame without claiming it—nothing is staged to impress. Light does not embellish; it exposes. Time does not freeze; it settles into the surface of the photograph. The viewer senses that the image was not seized but allowed to surface.
The book opens with family photographs, not as autobiographical indulgence but as an acknowledgment of continuity. On these islands, time seems less linear than cyclical. Sea and sun weather buildings quickly, stripping away the gloss of newness and folding everything into the landscape. Limited infrastructure—often a single road connecting the main points—reinforces a sense of physical and perceptual concentration. Movement happens on foot. Walking, for Plossu, is not a romantic gesture but an operational necessity: without moving through space, there are no photographs. The geography of the islands, defined by clear edges and constant horizons, creates the ideal condition for a gaze rooted in attentiveness.
In his introductory essay, Walter Guadagnini observes that these photographs offer an Italy stripped of monumental rhetoric and grand historical display. What emerges instead is a minimal, wind-swept territory where landscape and human traces alternate in a balance that mirrors the actual tempo of island life. The book unfolds less as a sequence of views than as a coherent emotional atlas, each image resonating quietly with the next.
This publication marks the seventh collaboration between Plossu and Fondazione Almayuda, confirming a partnership grounded in shared vision and long-term commitment. The Odyssey of the Small Italian Islands is neither nostalgic nor touristic. It is a sustained exercise in looking—an insistence on slowness, on proximity, on the essential.