Mario Giacomelli is one of Italy’s most prominent photographers and one of the most famous photographers of the twentieth century. His deeply humanistic photography focused largely on his native country, although he did produce notable series on the pilgrimage site of Lourdes, France, and documented the 1974 famine in Ethiopia.
Discovered in Italy in 1955 by the Italian photographer Paolo Monti, he became known in the United States from 1963 by John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Szarkowski presented a series called Scanno and later included an image of the photographer in his famous book Looking at Photographs (1973).
Born in 1925 in the port town of Senigallia in the Marche region of central Italy, Giacomelli grew up in a modest family. His father died when he was nine. From then on he devoted himself to poetry and painting. At the age of 13 he went to work for a printer. After 1953, Giacomelli took photographs in the area with a Comet Bencini, a very popular camera at the time. The following year, as a self-taught photographer, he joined the Misa photographic group founded by Giuseppe Cavalli in Senigallia. Also in the group at the beginning were Vincenzo Balocchi, Ferruccio Ferroni, Pier Giorgio Branzi, Paolo Bocci and Silvio Pellegrini. Although Cavalli was a formalist who favoured aesthetically composed photographs in gradients of light grey, Giacomelli, whose later work featured similarly sharp contrasts, benefited from his experience with Cavalli. Over the next few years, Cavalli prepared the members of Misa to join the photographic group La Bussola, which he had founded in 1947 with Ferruccio Leiss, Mario Finazzi, Federico Vender and Luigi Veronesi. The formalist style of those years contrasted with that of the neo-realists who, in the post-war period, began to photograph the country, especially the land and people of southern Italy, without aestheticizing the image. In literature, the neo-realists included Elio Vitorini and Cesare Zavattini; in film, Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti; and in photography, Nino Migliori, Franco Pinna and Gianni Berengo Gardin. The photographic works were influenced by a reality that their authors had experienced and wanted others to experience, but also showed the influence of American precursors, such as the Farm Security Administration and Eugene W. Smith. At the same time (1953-1955), Paul Strand, with his objective point of view, was photographing his series Un paese in the Italian town of Dorf Luzzara in the Po Valley. In this cultural and photographic context, Giacomelli developed an individual style that set him apart from the others.
His photographs were not intended as reportage or documentation, but as a way of overcoming his innermost fears. He saw the camera as a means of expression, like the brush for the painter and the pen for the poet.
He was largely indifferent to lighting conditions, using an electronic flash. His expressive language, the composition and formal structure of which he learned while working as a printer, is composed of many elements. These include the stark juxtaposition of black and white and a strong, coarse granularity on high-contrast photographic paper. He also used seemingly random, formal elements created by deliberately ‘bad’ photographic techniques, such as moving the camera and shooting out of focus, or resorting to double exposure and extreme development of the negatives. As a result, many of his works appear to be a mixture of spiritual and material objects. Other works emphasise the tension created by strong graphic contrasts. The background is often washed out in an overexposed white, while the black bodies seem to float. Movement in photography is very important to Giacomelli because it represents life and the passage of time. As in his poetry, he developed his own visual language, which allowed him to depict scenes that corresponded to his vision and perception of the world. The titles of his photographic series are usually borrowed from stories or poems by authors who inspired him, such as Cesare Pavese, Edgar Lee Masters, Emily Dickinson, Giacomo Leopardi and Eugenio Montale.
Giacomelli cherished the series, which he often reassembled years later by rearranging the pictures. His favourite subjects were poor and simple people. His photographic projects would take up to three years to complete because he wanted to get to know each situation by living with the people in order to work among them. After 1986, he expanded the content of his images with symbolic, artificial elements such as pigeons, cardboard masks and fur dogs. An example of this is the photographic series Il pittore Bastari (1992-1993).
Among his most famous series is Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi – a title inspired by a poem by Pavese – composed of photographs taken in 1955-1956, 1966-1968 and 1983. Ruthless, ruthlessly and bluntly, Giacomelli presents the residents of an old people’s home in intimate close-ups, the camera flash contrasting with their wrinkled skin. In another work, he juxtaposes these dying old people with the young suffering people of Lourdes (1957).
Giacomelli took the pictures in the Scanno series – named after the small town in the Abruzzi region of Italy that he visited in 1957 and 1959, five years after Henri Cartier-Bresson – in just a few days. Although he photographed the inhabitants in their daily routines, his eye and technique give the images an expression of a mystical engagement with the unconscious. The formal contrasts in his photographs of women dressed in black against white walls reflect the internal oppositions of youth and age, tradition and progress, masculinity and femininity.
The series Presa di coscienza sulla natura consists of images taken between 1954 and 2000. With an abstract effect, the series shows images of cultivated land, oceans and beach landscapes, some of which were photographed from an aeroplane. Giacomelli reworked many of the negatives to make the print more suited to his intentions. This type of representation shows the influence of the Italian artist Alberto Burri, whom Giacomelli met in 1968. Although the title of another series, Io non ho mani che mi accarezzino il volto (I have no hands to caress my face, after a poem by David Maria Turold) (1961-1963), sounds melancholy, these photographs of priests playing in and against a backdrop of snow have a spontaneous, happy and vital effect.
Caroline Branson (1971-1973), inspired by Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, is a love story in evocative images whose dramatic content represents the loss of ecstasy and the cycle of death and rebirth. Giacomelli made particular use of the surreal effect produced by the double exposure of a negative, which is particularly suited to depicting visions of the invisible and the unconscious.
In Favola, verso possibili significati interiori (1983-1984), Giacomelli presents largely abstract images of bent iron rails that encourage the personal imagination of both the photographer and the viewer. He believed that the message of the image only comes to life in the viewer’s interpretation.
In Ninna nanna, a collection of photographs taken between 1955 and 1987, the author recalls the memory of his childhood in his sadness at the transience and vanity of human creations. The death of his mother in 1986 was another trigger for the melancholy and memories that he incorporated into the series L’infinito (1986-1988) and A Silvia (1987-1990), also inspired by the poetry of Leopardi.
Giacomelli’s later series, such as Io sono nessuno! (1992-1994), Bando (1997-1999) and Questo ricordo lo vorrei raccontare (2000), contain graphic signs, the disappearance of figures and their shadows. In these works the author expresses an inner world: the alienation and despair of human individuality, loneliness, the traces of time, transience and death.
Arturo Carlo Quintavalle called Giacomelli’s works ‘informal photographs’ and read them as the photographer’s self-analysis. Giacomelli, who spent most of his life in his native region, died in his home town of Senigallia in 2000. Giacomelli’s work is represented in many photographic collections. These include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York; the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Pushkin Museum in Moscow; and the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione at the University of Parma.
