Focus on
Paola Francesca Barone
Paola Francesca Barone is a self-taught photographer of Apulian and Arbëreshë origin, currently living and working in Naples. Her practice is deeply informed by a humanistic education that spans classical languages, Sanskrit, and philosophy, disciplines that continue to shape her visual language and conceptual approach. This intellectual background permeates her work, lending it a layered and reflective quality in which images often function as sites of inquiry rather than simple representations.
Her Arbëreshë heritage, in particular, plays a central role in her artistic sensibility, understood as a form of cultural stratification in which memory, language, and identity coexist in continuous negotiation. This inherited multiplicity becomes a recurring undercurrent in her photography, where the idea of culture is not fixed but lived as a shifting and embodied experience, “like a language within a language,” revealing hidden grammars of belonging and displacement.
“Self-portraiture began as an act of urgency — a way of returning to myself when everything else had dissolved. The body became the only landscape I could still navigate.”
Since 2018, Barone’s practice has increasingly centered on conceptual self-portraiture. Within this framework, the body is not treated as a static subject but as a mutable territory to be traversed, questioned, and reconfigured. Her self-portraits operate as thresholds between presence and absence, visibility and erasure, identity and dissolution. Through staged gestures, symbolic environments, and carefully constructed visual metaphors, she explores the fragile boundaries of the self and its continuous transformation in relation to time, memory, and perception.
Her work has gained international recognition and has been exhibited in various contexts beyond Italy. It has also been featured in publications such as L’Œil de la Photographie, LensCulture, and Dodho Magazine, among others. In addition, her contribution to contemporary photographic discourse is acknowledged in Giorgio Bonomi’s volume dedicated to self-portraiture in Italian contemporary art, published by Rubbettino, where her work is situated within a broader reflection on the evolving language of self-representation.
