"I am nothing" by Valerio Spada is an impressive work because it shows us the silence, the penetration of crime in everyday life and our failure or inability to defend ourselves.     

- Roberto Saviano, Writer 

LightBox presents a special preview of the season’s best photography books. In an age when so many of us experience photography almost exclusively on digital screens, these beautifully produced publications, from publishers large and small, proudly embrace the power of print and keep the brilliant tradition of the photobook very much alive. 

- TIME Magazine

Valerio Spada fotografa la mafia come nessun altro sa fare

Il suo lavoro documenta l’impatto del crimine organizzato in Italia, ma in modo diverso da tutti gli altri reporter.

- iD Magazine

‘Gomorrah Girl by Valerio Spada, this is a book that I can really learn something from.’ 

- Jim Goldberg, Magnum Photos 

‘Spada’s book – self-published, stapled together, a brilliant combination of the roughhewn with the exquisite – is a memorial for a dead girl, a cri de coeur for vulnerable young women and a penetrating examination of the social ills resulting from a corrupt and rotten political system.’ 

- Martin Parr / Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Vol.III – Phaidon 

“At first glance, Gomorrah Girl may seem to be an unassuming even haphazard book, but as each page unfolds, the viewer is challenged by layers of meaning.”“This is a moving book of photographs and documents that one wants to return to repeatedly,” says Himes, (Head of International Photographs at Christie’s), describing what made the book a winner.

- Darius Himes, Christie’s International Photographs, TIME Magazine Lightbox

David Senior (MoMa NYC Librarian and curator) + Bruno Ceschel (curator) book SPBH: A DIY Manual and Manifesto, recently awarded with PDN Best Book 2016 and featuring best selfpublished books selected by Senior and Ceschel. [An accurate measure of SPBH’s importance to the contemporary cottage industry is the array of photobooks they have featured that I would cite as contemporary classics. These include Gomorrah Girl by Valerio Spada, about a girl growing up in the shadow of mafia violence in Naples]

- The Guardian

'Gomorrah Girl' and 'I am nothing' are the main series produced by the young photographer Valerio Spada. Thanks to the first series, he made himself known throughout the world in 2011, while he has recently brought the second to a close thanks to the support of a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation in New York. Both revolve around the study of the most typical and yet obscure aspects of the major Italian criminal organizations: the Neapolitan Camorra and the Sicilian Mafia. And yet these are not mere reportages, but combine truth and storytelling, diary and theatre, both candid and staged photography. They are cinematographic fiction raised to the level of judiciary truth. And vice versa.

- Francesco Zanot, Curator 

Spada’s images of young women are highly charged; there is a tension at play, a sense that something is amiss. Allusions to childhood — Hello Kitty, Daisy Duck, oversized headbands and plastic jewelry – appear duplicitous in the company of his subjects. They do not feel like children; they appear sexualized and desensitized to the violence that surrounds and subsumes them. The faces of these teenagers are viscerally hardened, projecting austere personas developed for survival.

- Allie Haeusslein, Pier24 Gallery, Director