CULTURE WATCH Mancini’s photos depict the aftermath of loss BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

The nearly 20 black-and-white photographs that surround the third floor stairway of Providence City Hall pack the softened punch of aftermath. Most show sidewalk shrines with clusters of lit candles, flowers, poems, and mementos of the lives of murder victims, sometimes with friends and relatives looking grimly on. A mother stares down at a framed picture of a young boy who looks up at us. An intense young man stands with a photograph of a friend on his chest along with "R.I.P. Barry." Accompanying newspaper articles sum up the impact in headlines. "Caught in the crossfire." "14-year-old chased down and shot on Smith Hill." "Teens, Cars — And Guns."

Photographer Salvatore Mancini’s exhibition, Shrines of Healing: Transforming Violence — Cultivating Community, will be up through the end of November.

For the past decade and a half, Mancini, 57, has stressed the relationship of man and nature or social setting. He has taken on several Rhode Island-centered subjects, from the immigrants of Itri, Italy, who settled in Cranston’s Knightsville, to the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the Blackstone River Valley. But only his 1981 photographic essay on the lives of patients in the state’s mental health institutions was as tense with back stories. "I’ve photographed shrines all over the world, so I’ve always been drawn to these places of calm in the middle of chaos, places where there is communication with the spirit world," he says, "such as petroglyphs in the Southwest."

This project began three years ago when the Cranston-based photographer happened upon a demonstration during the trial of the man charged with killing 16-year-old Jennifer Rivera, who was shot before she could testify to witnessing an earlier murder. Mancini says, "I was driving through South Providence and I came upon that site. All her friends were out there. There were hundreds of candles. People were writing things and leaving mementos, and it was very, very emotional."

He has since photographed public responses to more than 30 killings, building visual stories around such images as posters or placards left after memorial rallies, remarks spray-painted on a sidewalk, and the people at those shrines. "I’m trying to decide whether I want to go deeper into it and go more into the family environment, the families of the victims," Mancini says. "Would it be that much better? I don’t know. I can’t really say. How much more is out there to photograph and make this project more powerful and more complete? I don’t know."

One thing he does know is that he does not have suggestions for improving urban blight and violent neighborhoods.

"I didn’t go into this project to be a spokesperson for these problems," he says, noting that he is as appalled as anyone at these deaths. "I don’t carry that kind of burden, that kind of purpose."