Few photographers have been as successful as Mario Giacomelli in coaxing such richness of sign and significance from photographic paper. Giacomelli’s black and white prints are incisive and dense fill the shapes and exalt the lights in contrast with the darks. The originality of his language distanced him from the other great masters, mainly Americans, to whom our authors have always looked. The photographer, whose works are found in all the important international collections, is probably the most renowned and acclaimed Italian photographer abroad. For this reason, it is worth examining his artistic career to understand how a man of limited cultural attainments, who never left his little home town of Senigallia, in the Marche region on the Adriatic coast of Italy, was able to achieve such great success. Giacomelli grew up in a very poor family; he was just three years old when his farmer father died, leaving his widow with three small children. This meant that helping the family took priority over attending school. He held a variety of little jobs until he was able to start his own printing business, which would be his great passion, along with photography. Despite his poverty, Giacomelli was curious, he painted, wrote and read poetry. His mother worked to support the family as maid to a wealthy, cultured local family, the Cavalli.

In this little town, lacking any particular attractions, interest in photography, though limited to a small group of people, was very lively. A leading member of the group was Giuseppe Cavalli, who was a lawyer, a man of letters and a music lover. In 1947 he founded a club called “La Bussola” with other photographer friends. In his opinion, the subject was not what mattered, but rather the composition, the value of the greys and whites, the use of space. After a while, however, young photographers like Giacomelli began to find La Bussola too confining for their new ideas, so in 1954 they founded a new club, “Associazione Fotografica Misa”, and Giacomelli became treasurer. Its aim was to update and develop the ideas and programs put in place until then in the field of photography. Here is how Giacomelli described Misa “A group free of the current polemics between formalism and neorealism, in which each of us spoke his own language, with humility before the subject, free of political ideology, believing in friendship, exchanging ideas, respecting one another, facing reality.”

Cavalli continued to condition the world of photography, however, with his unquestioned authority, and Giacomelli managed to keep his distance, without entering into a direct conflict with the master, but devoting himself to independent research. “My personal interest has always been man. Even my landscapes, for me, are portraits of the men who created them.”

The landscapes
The subject of the landscape, which engaged Giacomelli in a study extending over thirty years, was an inexhaustible source of creative investment in which the photographer was able to renew himself with each new picture. The critic Racanicchi describes these works “Where Giacomelli explodes in all his magnificence as an artist is in his landscapes. Here, the visual intelligence of this photographer combines with a lyricism that is one of the most sublime in the world’s photography, demonstrating its immense value and exquisite construction. In a violent tonal contrast, so strong as to adulterate the physical consistency of the things portrayed, Giacomelli’s landscapes reveal themselves to us in fractions and sectors, splotches and shades, now dark and rough, now marked by dense, incisive lines, indicating the precise transposition of particular states of mind of the images portrayed. Giacomelli’s landscapes illustrate, in the accentuation of the chiaroscuro effects, in the isolation of the shapes, in the absence of decorative details and surroundings, the intense sentiment of their maker, the strength of his discomfort, the melancholy of old memories”. The newness of Giacomelli’s work can be found in his ability to renew a recurrent theme of the visual arts such as the “landscape,” giving the photographic image an abstract interpretation.

I have no hands to caress my face
In this series, taken from a passage in a poem by David Maria Turoldo, the pictures describe, in contrast with the vaguely existentialist title, moments of recreation in a seminary. Antonella Russo writes “The various pictures of pretini (young priests) enthusiastically throwing themselves into a children’s game makes us accomplices to very human situations like that of getting carried away by play, shattering the peace of the place, visually revealing the pleasure of suspending inhibitions and prohibitions, of gleeful transgression. These are the most spirited, whimsical photographs produced by Giacomelli and the most memorable, thanks to their graphic structure based on the predominance of the white background, which controls and highlights the dark figures”.

Scanno boy
This photograph is one of the “Scanno” series, taken between 1957 and 1959 in the little town of the same name, in the Abruzzo region and, along with the photographs of seminarians, “Pretini”, among the most famous of Giacomelli’s pictures. The international fame of this work is linked to the name of John Szarkowski, director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who decided to buy it for the museum’s permanent collection. “The photography of Mario Giacomelli is a drawing of dark figures against a dark background, which revolve around a boy who levitates within the glow of the beaten path … It seems effectively unlikely that the visual intelligence of a photographer could be so sharp as to recognize in such a brief, plastic instant the pictorial significance of the action taking place on the deep stage before his lens”.

By Silvia Berselli