Valerio Spada’s I Am Nothing examines Sicily, Italian politics, and the hidden world of the Mafia, which permeates the lives of everyday people. The book casts light on the murky relationship between politics and crime. It focuses on the people who work frenetically to maintain the status quo, the criminals who believe they are on a mission, and the special unit of the Italian police, operating where corruption, secrets, religion, pacts, and the Mafia intertwine.

Spada documents the criminals and fugitives described in the book’s 2015 account of the preceding forty-six years. He shows what they sacrificed in order to rule, including figures whose clandestine lives separated them from family relationships. The book reveals how these figures communicate with the outside world through letters called pizzini, which reach the designated recipient only after being passed from person to person seven times. It also calls attention to what a person carries when deciding to disappear.

Published by Twin Palms Publishers in March 2015, the hardcover volume measures 8 x 10 inches and contains 142 four-color plates across 120 pages. The ISBN is 978-1-936611-11-9. Valerio Spada is credited as the photographer, and the publisher lists the title as out of print.

The photographs invite readers to consider how a hidden system becomes visible through the people, documents and routines associated with it. The book’s attention to communication and disappearance links political structures to individual circumstances. Its subject is grounded in the historical context of the project, rather than offered as a current account of every person depicted. Read as a photobook, it develops that inquiry across a sustained sequence of images, asking how secrecy shapes both daily life and the evidence available to an observer.