Word by Jess Baxter

 

Looking at a Letizia Le Fur photograph is like seeing colours for the first time. The hyper-saturated shades of Le Fur’s series at Caruso feel primordial, as if the world’s elements – earth, water, light and sky – are imbued with a sense of something ancient and mythical. 

 

Creating harmonious compositions like these comes naturally to Le Fur, a skill rooted in her education at École des Beaux-Arts. She originally trained as a painter, but then soon discovered it was photography that best embodies the blurring of reality and fiction she so sought in her work. Le Fur cites the dreamlike gardens of Hieronymus Bosch as an endless inspiration, so it only feels apt that she was the artist commissioned to capture the verdant mystique of the Amalfi Coast for Belmond’s ongoing photographic project. 

 

Famed for restoring historic properties, the luxury hotel group is collaborating with world-leading contemporary photographers to create personal bodies of work in response to their destinations, carefully pairing each artist with the visceral character of a place. Caruso has a history that goes back almost one thousand years, with the likes of Virginia Woolf and Jackie Kennedy numbered amongst previous guests. The hidden palace of Ravello, much of its ancient architecture has been carefully conserved and renovated over time.

 

There is a certain genius in the way Le Fur depicts this architecture against the glowing hills and towering cliffs of this most iconic stretch of Italy’s coastline. The planes appear almost flat, like an ethereal stage set for Pina Bausch or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where one could simply step out and glide across their surface. The gardens could have been plucked straight from a Hayao Miyazaki fantasy. 

 

It was quite intentional for these photographs to reinforce the dreamlike, timeless aspect of the place. Le Fur sought to capture what she calls the ‘omnipresent sun’ – that buttery light that soaks the 11th-century walls and cliffside gardens. 

 

It is this singular observation that drives the book; every subject Le Fur captures is soaked in a luminescence that plays a character in several acts, and it is the sun’s kaleidoscopic theatrics that form the heart of the story. Le Fur pulls you into her imagination, inviting you to see the world as she does, and to leave feeling the warmth and never-ending myth of travel.