THEAnd my photographs are my emotions. There is already everything in this declaration by Mario Giacomelli, vocation and intention.
Unique and inimitable, he impressed the photographic sign. A strong and decided language in every image, or rather, in each series. Because each image is part of a universe that the artist chooses and investigates and therefore becomes a series, story. The single image cannot live alone, as a speech cannot exist only with a word.
Mario Giacomelli, singer of sentiment, observes the world and the world is his interiority. From inside to outside, so the art moves and so it is the creative process, it is excavated deep, the image is already there, it leads to light, emerges and becomes matter, it is the work.
The poet of photography
It was the poet of photography. Famous to the general public for the dance prettini, he has created everything that can be asked for photography. He lived and loved her, handled and treated as a living matter. Matter that flowed from the tanks of his dark chamber, engraved by the emulsions and maneuvers he performed in the dark, illuminated only by a red lamp. In full photographic neorealism, he shyded the idea that this language was a search for truth. For him photography was creative processdid not end with the shot on the contrary, the instant of the recovery was only the beginning. Then the miracles that gave life to the work succeeded.
Without ever judging
A man deeply in contact with his drives, visceral and incendiary. There is the fire of the passion and life in many of her series, her gaze straight in the face of pain, free from the prejudices of social photography of the time. There is a sort of carnality, the possession of the subject and the wide and at the same time profound observation that looks at the human without judgment.
Caroline Branson from Spoon River, 1958 © Mario Giacomelli Archive
His images are never perfect, the aesthetic is not a habit, but the consequence of vision. Ungrammatical, often extreme, free experimenter, faithful only to himself. A heretic of neorealism that does not make scismmi, but proceeds only and tireless in his research. Search, digs, destroys rules, opens gaps, a free innovator who does not fear judgment.
Within 50 kilometers
If you are an exception for some trips to the south, for example Calabria has made all its important production within a radius of 50 kilometers around her city, Senigallia. The Marche, his land, with the landscapes ranging from the hills to the sea, those hills that will return us with the gaze of artist transfigured and brought back to the abstract matter, before the form given by man. His black and white is a changing imprint, sensitive to contrast, like his now painful and dry sign in the hospice series, now abstract in the landscapes.
An immense archive
He left an immense archive of 40 thousand vintage prints. And it is precisely fromMario Giacomelli archive that the desire to return, on the centenary of the artist’s birth, a great opportunity for knowledge of his work has emerged. Now, in fact, two complementary exhibitions, edited by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Katiuscia Biondi Giacomelli, the granddaughter, take place together in Rome, “Mario Giacomelli. The photographer and the artist” to Palazzo delle Esposizioni and Milan, “Mario Giacomelli. The photographer and the poet “at Palazzo Reale, giving life to a new and happy synergy between the two different capital and the two cultural institutions, to celebrate this undisputed master. In both, his dark chamber was reproduced, for the lovers an immersion in the intimacy of daily practice, in that craftsmanship of analog photography that evokes the smell of acids, the enchantment of the darkness in which the magic of the apparition of the image takes place. A moving nostalgia that pervades the exposure rooms while the titles of the works flow, To Silvia, The infinite, Spoon River, will come death and will have your eyesjust to name a few.
On display in Milan 300 works organized with precious care to understand the chapters of his research. A simple and clear exhibition so that everyone can know and understand it and discover its passions and obsessions. His relationship with art and love for poetry, he who had not studied, son of farmers, became the most complete and acclaimed photographer that this country has had. He exposed a lot, never enough to say after seeing the preview of the Milanese exhibition and, although the fame arrived early – already in 1964 John Szarkowki, director of the photography department from MOMA of New York acquires the series Scanno And I have no hands that caress my face – Observing the current exhibition and imagining the Roman one, you have the feeling that despite the size of these exhibitions, it is not exhausted but that, in that immense archive, there are still many treasures to find. The imposing catalog, published by Silvana Editoriale, collects the hundreds of exposed images and a series of critical essays and extremely interesting and exhaustive biographical notes.
The exhibitions:
Edited by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Katiuscia Biondi Giacomelli
Mario Giacomelli. The photographer and the poet
May 22 – 7 September 2025 Palazzo Reale Milan
Mario Giacomelli – The photographer and the artist
May 20 – August 3, 2025 Palazzo delle Esposizioni Rome
I woman © RESERVED REPRODUCTION