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From the Publisher: “City of Secrets is Jed Fielding's first monograph. These extraordinary images, the product of twenty years spent photographing in the streets of Naples, constitute a major body of work by an important American photographer. Fielding's unforgettable portraits are illuminated by an insightful essay contributed by photography writer Nan Richardson. Naples itself is beautifully detailed by Shirley Hazzard, who provides a historic and poetic context for Fielding's work. But at the heart of the book are the photographs themselves.”

From the Essay by Nan Richardson: "A strange light inhabits the photographs of Jed Fielding, a pale gray that one associates with place. It has the cool texture of marble. It preserves a certain formality, even if the camera lens allows little personal space. It has a hallowing glow as it lights his subjects, denizens of the mean streets of Naples, with indigent pride. It gilds their disenfranchisement, their dispossession in the ghetto, with a strong sense of energy, tribal power, physicality, self-possession. Even if the accouterments of life in Naples are spartan, the light is triumphantly not. Elegant, voluptuous, vibrant, it registers joy in life as Fielding photographs limbs, faces, gestures, the bold stare of infants, the withered faces of age, the laughter of children.

“This is a book, then, about people, and only incidentally about place. In choosing Italy as his destination and inner-city Naples as a vocation... the photographer's intention was direct and premeditated: to get closer to people and, ultimately, to achieve what Fielding calls 'a quick, collaborative encounter.’ Implying his presence in their gaze, he lets the picture selflessly describe them. And in these photographs the conscious source of their energy is the essential bond of connecting--the interaction between the photographer and his subjects.”

Richardson also writes: “Calling his largest body of work City of  Secrets, Fielding has rendered homage to the urbanopolis, to the city itself, humanity’s most impressive and visible achievement, creating, as it does here, a cultural implosion in the density and diversity of human reaction. Its urgency fascinates Fielding. And in Naples, the high and low watermarks of urbanity – civilization and savagery, perfection and corruption, order and disorder, community and alienation – seem especially central. In the narrow, winding labyrinth of streets of Jed Fielding’s poignant photographs, very human epiphanies are revealed.”