Roman Manfredi's photographic series TRA pays homage to the femminielli of Naples, locals who live outside binary gender expectations, blending tradition and transformation in intimate portraits taken across the city.
Inspired by the femminiello figure
The series draws inspiration from the ancient Neapolitan figure of the femminiello, a revered presence considered spiritually favourable. Manfredi, a lens-based artist, uses analogue photography, moving image and sound, with his work sitting at the intersection of place, personal narratives and political landscapes.
Manfredi said: 'I feel that conversations around queer identity are often shaped by white North American and northern European academic frameworks. I was interested in looking beyond these contexts to explore how gender is embodied and lived through other cultural and historical perspectives. As my ancestry is Italian I sought a place that I felt was not only accepting but celebratory and respected in Italy. That led me to Naples and the femminielli.'
Exploring local histories
Following the discovery of an archival photograph of the artist's nonna, in a scene that is seemingly the wedding of two women, Manfredi wondered whether there may have been another experience of queerness in the family, deepening the desire to explore local histories.
Journeying through Napoli, where the landscape is caught between time periods, Manfredi traces connections between people and place. While dual-spirited identities have often been acknowledged in male-assigned bodies, female-born expressions of gender variance have historically been dismissed or disparaged, often carrying cultural and class-based stigma.
A state of being between
The word 'tra', Italian for a state of being between, among and within, speaks in this work to an energetic space where masculine and feminine converge and dissolve, and categories blur into something more elemental. Resisting the academic intellectualisation of identity, TRA is a piecing together of both tradition and transformation.
The relationships of people and place that Manfredi captures are further emphasised by the artist combining medium-format colour portraiture, grainy point-and-shoot and slow monochrome Super 8 film. In one image, Ciro Ciretta wears draped clothing modelled in depictions of the Madonna, while another subject, Leila, stoically gazes back at the camera much like the fresco of a man with his horse etched into a stone ruin in Pompeii.
Exhibition details
Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 5 is at Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow until 20 December. The exhibition is part of Season of Photography 2026, a celebration of photography in Scotland, and Manfredi's work is being shown alongside that of another artist, Sayuri Ichida.
