Mario Giacomelli

Giacomelli was born in the seaport town of Senigallia in the Marche region of Italy into a family of modest means. Only nine when his father died, the boy left high school at the age of 13 to work as a typesetter and spent his weekends painting and writing poetry. After the horrors of World War II, from 1953 on he turned to the more immediate medium of photography and joined the photography group Misa, formed that year. After pre-war years dominated by a Pictorialist aesthetic promoted by the Fascist government, these artists enjoyed experimenting with form. He wandered the streets and fields of post-war Italy, inspired by the gritty Neo-Realist films of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, and influenced by the renowned Italian photographer Giuseppe Cavalli, founder of Misa, and developing a style characterized by radical compositions, bold cropping and stark contrasts. In 1955 he was discovered in Italy by Paolo Monti, and beginning in 1963, became known outside Italy through John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Giacomelli was inspired by the literature of Cesare Pavese, Giacomo Leopardi (a native of Giacomelli's region), and the postwar existentialist Eugenio Montale, giants of Italian writing from which he often borrowed titles for his picture series, such as the confronting, unsentimental pictures he made (1955–57) in an old-people's home, where his mother worked as a washer-woman; Verrà la more e avrà i tuoi occhi ('Death will come and will have your eyes'), taken from a Pavese poem. He wrote his own poetry and his pictures are a reflection of their visual language. Like other members of Misa, Giacomelli photographed the simple lives of the poor of southern Italy, in 1957 and 1959 visiting Scanno, a small town in the Abruzzo region which Henri Cartier-Bresson had visited only five years before to make quite different pictures. I was honest towards the people I photographed in Scanno, because it was not my intention to say anything about their social condition. I was involved neither with political issues nor with the trend of seeking misery and poverty which many photographers had towards the south of Italy at that time. In Scanno I just wanted to dream; and I dreamt. There he produced the image known as Scanno Boy (1957), one of Giacomelli's best-known examples of the emotional effect of his technical innovation. It generates a portentous, 'pittura metafisica' atmosphere from which dark and out-of focus figures emerge, with only one single and central subject that is sharp: a boy in the middle distance who looks into the camera, framed by fleeting, black-haloed foreground figures, and strolling with his hands in his pockets, followed by two other identically dressed old women. In 1964 this photograph was shown by John Szarkowski in the notable exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Photographer’s Eye (and reproduced in the catalogue in 1966). The photograph is also published in Looking at Photographs. 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art New York (also by Szarkowski, 1973). In 2013 the boy was revealed by Simona Guerra, researcher and niece of Mario Giacomelli, to be Claudio De Cola, and on October 19, 1957, he was exiting the Church of Sant'Antonio da Padova like the people around him, after the Mass. Through several searches through the archives and in the town of Scanno, Guerra "met the parents of the boy, who is now in his sixties and does not live in Scanno anymore. His recognition, confirmed by himself, was also done by his parents. His mother, Teopista, produced several other pictures " of her son, providing "evidence that De Cola was the boy portrayed by Giacomelli."

Giacomelli was part of the first showing of Italian photography in the United States when in 1957 the Unione Fotografica Milanese was invited to show Contemporary Italian Photography at the George Eastman House, in Rochester, New York, showcasing 26 photographers. He showed one of his first landscape photographs from a series which he started in 1954 and continued to expand until 2000. Its geometry and abstraction attracted attention. Giacomelli became one of the most successful Italian photographers in the international scene during the 1970s and 1980s; Nathan Lyons curated shows of his work in 1968 and 1969; then after being promoted by MoMA photography curator John Szarkowski in 1975 he was included in an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum titled The Land organized by Bill Brandt and Mark Haworth-Booth. I Pretini (Little Priests) (1961-1963), a transcription of the everyday life of a group of young priests, resulted from his documentation of post-war Italian seminaries.