Bill Beckley
Bill Beckley is one of protagonists of Narrative Art, a conceptual art current that developed in the second half of the 1970s and associates photographic images and narrative texts.
For his Neapolitan Holidays project, Bill Beckley enlarged old Italian postcards dating back to 1915/1976 which had been found in the trunk of a Neapolitan family. The artist responded to these postcards with text messages sent from his mobile phone, using a contemporary instrument of communication. In addition to the brief messages, he placed the period images side-by-side with photographs taken in Naples during his recent visits, thus creating a short-circuit of significance in different times and contexts.
Whatever else may have been written, each postcard proclaimed: “I’m thinking of you”. The image is on one side and the text is on the other. These elements in Bill Beckley’s works merge into the same plane and every work becomes a fragment of a new story, leading us into a chronicle which intertwines iconic and metaphoric images, memories of personal experiences and excerpts from history.