Organised around six key words, Language, People, Silence, Enigma, Perspectives and Reverberations, the images retrace Jodice’s output and bring out the main features of his poetics: from technical and linguistic experiments to social photography, from the metaphysics of places to the suspension of time in the urban landscape, the sea and the classical world. Each chapter opens with a text setting the work in the history of photography and of art. The title quotes a 1917 painting by Carlo Carrà and refers to a fundamental element of his activity, the darkroom: the physical space where the photographer completes what he began when shooting, the forge where, with long-honed tools, he produces his images by wisely regulating the light. Jodice was the first teacher of photography in Italy, when the subject entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples in 1970: his name belongs naturally in a series called Lessons of Photography. The book grew out of conversations in his studio.