Memories’ dust: this is what over 700.000 images from Carbone Photographic Archive were likely to become. A priceless photographic heritage likely to be lost forever, because the negatives, damaged by moulds, were undergoing a steady process of deterioration.

The archive was preserved over the years by Riccardo Carbone’s son, Renato. Over time, he matured the desire to share this important historical memory.

We started from there. The Riccardo Carbone Association was born in 2016 and has become an Onlus in 2017. It is committed to the storing, digitalization and cataloguing of the archive’s photographic material. In the same year, the Ministry of Culture awarded the archive with the status of asset of particular historical and cultural interest.

We have come a long way since then and met many supporters along the way. The start of our activity was made possible by a crowd funding campaign that allowed us to purchase professional scanners for the digitalization of the images and new, non-acid cardboard boxes, which are appropriate to the storing of negatives. Then, in order to speed up the digitalization procedures ever further, we started the ‘Adopt a report’ campaign, supported by many private citizens and some companies. 

Finally, thanks to the availability of European funds through a tender call for cultural enterprises from the regional administration, today we have published tens of thousands of images already. Moreover, along with the digitalization process, we are increasing our cataloguing procedures of each photography. We are using the xDams cataloguing platform to archive the photographs. It has been devised by the company Regesta.exe, which adapted the data model devised by ICCD – Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation – for the description of photographic material, to the needs of our archive. Our new challenge is the detailed classification of the contents of each photograph, including people, objects, places, events and activities. In this way, we will be able to offer to those who visit our portal an extremely easy and satisfying research. Our aim is to offer an user-friendly portal, which will be able to answer a simple question we get asked all the time: ‘do you have any picture of….?’

But the Archive doesn’t stop at 1973. After the death of Riccardo Carbone, his son Renato continued the family tradition with his friends and colleagues Nino and Renato Nicois. Together, they have worked for the major national magazines and agencies and have narrated other 30 years of history of Naples and Campania, up to the end of the 90s. 

In this more recent Carbone-Nicois archive, we can find other hundreds of thousands of negatives and slides that narrate the history of Naples in the 80s and 90s: the tragedy of the earthquake, Maradona, the TV productions in the Rai Centre in Naples, the news, the trials and the great transformations of the city.