Bianco-Valente's 'Il libro delle immagini' Explores Narrative Over Visibility

Bianco-Valente, the Neapolitan artist duo, have published 'Il libro delle immagini' (Postmediabooks, Milan, 2020, 208 pp., €16.90, ISBN 9788874902620), a book that inverts the primacy of visual exposure by centering on narrative. They invited a diffuse community of contributors—linked to their artistic universe—to receive a photograph on the condition that it be revealed through storytelling rather than public display. The resulting 84 intimate tales form a fragmented, evocative narrative fabric that treats images as meta-narratives, existing only insofar as they are told and commented upon. The project challenges the contemporary selfie culture and the equation of an image with its appearance. Drawing on David Foster Wallace's idea that 'every love story is a ghost story' and that writing is 'practicing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the elements of humanity and magic that still survive,' the book posits art as a chronically infantile sensibility trained for defeat and precariousness. It weaves a labyrinth of connections where public and private, visible and hidden become inextricable. The work was created with the complicity of Gianni Romano/Postmedia Books. Marco Petroni, design theorist and critic, contributed to the text.