The Chiaramonte family hailed from the Sicilian town of Gela, on the southernmost tip of Italy and the most central area of the Mediterranean, but Giovanni grew up in the ambit of Milan, where from early on he dedicated himself to photography, both as an art with its intricate history and as a practice with its power to transform what it captures. He studied the work of a wide range of photographers, Luigi Ghirri among them, writing about them and publishing their work in a series for Ultreya. His interests were wide-ranging, including not only the work of Italian contemporaries but also that of others, such as the Russian photographer and filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Over half a century he built a corpus of images that touch on limits: borderlands, shorelines, international shipping lanes, and migration, doing so not only with an eye for their violence and scale but also with delicacy and respect. In Palermo, he tracked almost osmotic changes in population and the granular transformation inside existing buildings that chiefly North-African arrivals wrought within the old city...