I took this in Naples in 1982, while I was doing a project on the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia. Nobody was really talking about the Camorra publicly so I decided to go there, following the anti-mafia police. I wanted to confront violence and I needed to understand my own limits as a photographer, to understand when to shoot and when not to shoot. It was a way to build a thick skin.
This picture was taken while Antonio Ammaturo was the chief of the police squad – he gave me permission to photograph them. In the picture, he’s the guy standing on the right, supervising the interrogation. The other cops were special forces – real tough guys. Sometimes when I was following them I was really afraid: they rode around on motorbikes and I’d be hanging on behind them. It was crazy. I often thought I would die in a crash – but at least it wouldn’t have been at the hands of the mafia.
Just after I took this photo, one of the cops – the one facing the suspect – actually slapped him. I still have the ‘slap’ picture. But I prefer this one because it’s really like a mafia movie – the guy under interrogation could be Robert de Niro. You can feel the tension. After the cop hit him, I could only take a couple more pictures, because Antonio put his hand in front of my camera.
It was often like that. One detail you can see in the picture is that the blinds in the window are down. This was a signal – each time there was going to be a violent act, the cops would close the blinds. It meant I could prepare myself to be discreet. In a way, it also allowed the person in the interrogation chair to prepare too. Sure, they were really nasty guys – torturing people, extorting money – but sometimes I could feel pity for them. Some of them were very young, and they’d grown up in very poor neighbourhoods.
While I was in Naples, a big mafia boss was killed. I was allowed to stay to photograph the funeral, but it was really tense between the mafia and the police, and so dangerous that the police didn’t want me around any longer. A couple of weeks later I learned through the press that Antonio had been killed by the Camorra.
A young officer I had got on well with called to tell me he had been promoted to the new chief. I asked him if I could come back to do some more in-depth work and he agreed. He too was later assassinated. I have some really clear memories of that second stay in Naples. Some moments I didn’t even shoot because they were just too painful, like the woman who had just learned that her husband had been killed while he was with his mistress.
All my work has been around themes of identity, memory, the criminal underworld and immigration. I’m from a Jewish migrant family, but my parents didn’t want to talk about their past, their country of origin or their Jewish identity because it was too much for them, too painful. When my mother arrived in France from Algeria, she destroyed all the photographs she had of her family.
Maybe this is the real reason I became a photographer – because at home there weren’t any pictures at all. There was no family album, nothing from the past. I didn’t even know that my grandparents on my father’s side were sent to Auschwitz. Being a photographer was a way of looking for the missing images of my own story and building them into a new album, like the one I never had.
Patrick Zachmann’s CV
Born: Choisy-le-Roi, France
Influences: Diane Arbus, Brassaï, Josef Koudelka, William Klein, Sergio Larrain.
High point: My book on Jewish identity in 1987 – a really personal, intimate project for me.
Low point: When I was shot by a white South African policeman in 1990 as I was attempting to photograph Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.
Top tip: Trust your instinct and do not set up scenes. Often the reality will overtake the fiction.
