Mimi Mollica: Documentary Photography and Projects
Mimi Mollica is a Sicilian-born documentary photographer based in London. His best known body of work, Terra Nostra, looks at what decades of Mafia influence have left behind in Sicily, and an earlier series followed the spread of urban development around Dakar.
Mimi Mollica
Mollica's own portfolio is at mimimollica.com, where his selected works are listed with their dates. The site groups long-term personal projects such as Terra Nostra, En Route To Dakar, Moon City and Marginal Brazil alongside an archive of older reportage, and it also lists photography workshops he runs in Palermo and elsewhere in Sicily.
His publisher describes him as a Sicilian-born photographer working out of London, which places him in a long line of documentarians who photograph the place they came from after living somewhere else for years. That distance matters to the work. The Sicily in Terra Nostra is not the Sicily of visiting news crews, and it is not nostalgic either.
Terra Nostra
Terra Nostra was published by Dewi Lewis Publishing as a clothbound hardback of 128 pages. The publisher's listing states that Mollica photographed the island from 2009, concentrating on corruption, extortion, illegal building along the coast and the sense of constraint that runs through daily life there. The book carries an introduction by the Sicilian judge Roberto Scarpinato and an afterword by Sean O'Hagan, photography critic for the Guardian and the Observer. The first printing is now listed as sold out.
Reviewing the book for 1000 Words, Gerry Badger described a run of landscapes and street portraits made across western Sicily, from Palermo towards Agrigento, in which the Mafia is present through metaphor and symbol rather than through direct evidence. That is the central decision of the project. Mollica does not photograph crime scenes or trials. He photographs the ground, the buildings and the faces that organised crime has shaped.
En Route To Dakar
Mollica's site dates En Route To Dakar to 2007 and 2008. The series took second place in the Professional Commission of the first Syngenta Photography Award in 2013, which carried a prize of US$10,000 and ran under the theme Rural-Urban. The award's own announcement of the 2013 winners names Mollica as the second-placed photographer in that category. The work deals with road building and urban expansion pushing out into the countryside around the Senegalese capital.
Why the photobook matters to work like this
Projects of this kind rarely survive as magazine commissions. Seven years of photographs about the slow damage done to a region do not fit a news cycle, and the book becomes the form that holds them. Dewi Lewis Publishing, based in Stockport, has been one of the steadier British outlets for that sort of sequencing, and the same imprint published Jon Tonks's work on the South Atlantic territories. You can read more about that project on our page on Jon Tonks.
Other photographers whose documentary projects we cover are listed on the speakers index, with the wider archive on the talks pages.
Photo Forum is an independent journal. We are not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group, and nothing on this page is drawn from an interview conducted by us. Everything above comes from the photographer's own site, his publisher and the award organiser, all linked in the text.