"The Photographs I Love" 19 – Mario Giacomelli

“My photos are not
made to be understood,
they are just stimuli
for the observer to interpret
and continue my thought.”
(Mario Giacomelli)

 

Mario Giacomelli. “I have no hands to caress my face”, 1962

This time I want to tell you about a very particular photographer: Mario Giacomelli.

It can be said that he is part of our cultural heritage, someone to be proud of.

Few photographers can be said, like him, that they have a real poetic. This word was used at school to describe the literary world of the great writers and poets. Something that went beyond simple style.

Every writer, poet, photographer or painter has his own style, but there are not many who can also boast to be poetic.

 

Mario Giacomelli was born on 1 August 1925 in Senigallia.

After being orphaned by his father at the age of nine, Giacomelli became an apprentice – four years later – at the Giunchedi Printing House where he remained until the war came. In this way, he tries to help her mother, a laundress at a hospice, who is forced to support her three small children on her own.

In the 1950s, he opened his own printing house, thanks to the savings given as a gift by an elderly guest of the hospice where his mother worked.

Having bought a Bencini Comet S (CMF) in 1953, Giacomelli understands that photography is his passion. He snaps assiduously. He portrays all of his relatives and friends, and participates in photographic competitions.

In those years he met Giuseppe Cavalli, an artist and art critic with a charismatic temperament, who initiated him to reflect on Photography and Art.

 

Mario Giacomelli

At the end of the 1950s, his “reporting” phase began and Lourdes (1957), Scanno (1957/59), Puglia (1958, where he returned in 1982), Gypsies (1958), Loreto (1959, where he returned in 1995) were born. A man, a woman, a love (1960/61), Slaughterhouse (1960), Pretini (1961/63), La buona terra (1964/66).

He is passionate about poetry, translating some famous poems into images.

In 1966 he meets Alberto Burri, with whom he establishes a deep friendship and to whom he will dedicate works of Landscapes where there is a strong reference to the informal and the artist's poetics. The informal, in fact, fascinates Giacomelli so much that, from the late 1950s to the 1970s, he himself created hundreds of paintings.

 

So, we read in his biography:

“In 1986 his mother died, and for the artist, it is a very strong trauma that marks a change in his photographic production towards an ever more explicit autobiographical datum. By now his notoriety has expanded internationally and in the world, his works are requested by the most prestigious art museums, while his research becomes more and more introspective, intimate, and devoted to the Void, closed in his Marche region to photograph the landscape as a possible place of discovery of himself. The Life series of the painter Bastari from 1992/93, the Self-portraits (1980s/90s) and the corroded walls of Per Poesie e Poesie in cerca d'autore ('90), the “abstract” poems by Bando ('97 / 99), December 31st (1997), are now scenarios completely constructed by a Giacomelli who uses photography as frames of a film lasting an entire life.

In all this passing of a life, Giacomelli has never stopped photographing the landscape, the fields, and the hills of the earth around Senigallia places that the artist knew as his image reflected in the mirror and from here various series was born: Landscapes (from 1954/60s), photographed from below, nostalgic and poetic; Memories of reality (1956/68), the rectangular farmhouse on top of the hill seen from below (in San Silvestro, a hamlet of Senigallia); Metamorphosis of the earth, photos were taken mainly on the hills of Arcevia (municipality between Senigallia and Sassoferrato) and Sant'Angelo (fraction of Senigallia) (from '55 to '68), and in Montelago (fraction of Sassoferrato) and Vallone (fraction di Senigallia) (from '60 to '80): it is the landscape photographed from the opposite hill, which makes it seem that the earth has been photographed from a bird's eye view. Giacomelli begins here to look for signs, scratches, and contrasts and overexposes to add black areas and thus decontextualize and abstract the landscape to a cosmic dimension. At the end of the 60s, but especially in the 70s / 80s, the ground began to collapse, in the photos the cracks and slips due to the arrival of intensive agriculture and the end of the farmer's care for the land is evident. Then there are the Landscapes from above (voyage to Bilbao, 1975): Giacomelli is flying to Spain because he has been called to be part of the jury of a photographic award, and from here comes the idea of rising to look from another perspective. Hence Awareness of Nature (1976/ 990s), aerial landscapes are taken from a Piper plane: in the high contrast of the photos from this period ('76/1980s) and in the focal importance of the signs, of the abstraction, and the essentialization of forms, it is always important for the artist (as can be seen from his notes on the specimens) to keep the material teeming. In the 90s the aerial landscapes are less contrasted and with fewer signs, the space more homogeneous, the gaze more detached: intensive agriculture has now inexorably changed the landscape.”

He died in Sinigallia in 2000.

 

Mario Giacomelli. “The great landscapes series”, 1980/1985

Lately, I was lucky enough to make my own a small book written by Vincenzo Marzocchini, entitled “around a poem by mario giacomelli”.

It is a short essay on the photographer's work through the analysis of a very beautiful poem by him, written in 1998:

 
“I don't want to see things
in pictures, but
analyze thoughts,
do not look back
in the face of reality
but enter under the
skin, add reality
to reality, that time
which is inside the image
and that belongs only to the
photography, that time
that everything changes
but nothing destroys.”

These short lines go very well, especially in the finale, with the famous image of the little priests dancing in a circle on the snow.

Which is the photograph I chose for Giacomelli.

I don't even know when I first saw it, but it seems to me to get lost in the haze of time – almost as if it were an ancestral image of the unconscious.

It is part of the “pretini” (little priests) series that Giacomelli shot in 1962.

He lived for a year in that seminary in Sinigallia, taking many images, some of them secretly, like this shot from the roof, while the priests played on the snow in the courtyard.

In other photographs, the priests smoked the cigarettes he secretly gave them, and it was precisely because of this that he was thrown out of the seminary.

But by now he had this series of photographs that have consigned him to the history of Photography.

 

Much of the beauty of this photo, in my opinion, comes from its title: “I have no hands to caress my face”. Gorgeous title.

As if that play as a child were the symbolic substitution of affection and a love that no female hand can ever give them.

In fact, it has always fascinated me to notice, by spying, how much affinity and complicity there was between nuns or priests in company.

Seeing the nuns laughing and joking with each other has always made me think of a kind of childhood regression.

As if being outside the common existence relieved them of the burden of maturity.

These pretini, whose strong black/white contrast typical of Giacomelli, almost become the symbol of the joy of living.

 

The last phase of his expressive research will become darker, after the death of his mother. He will look in the furrows of the barren earth for those wrinkles of the human body that toil and die.

 

He will write a few years before his death:

“My photos want to delude themselves into being secret writings, not beautiful images, not made to be simply understood, but to be interpreted...

I am a traveler of sensations in unknown lands, where everything must be interpreted.”

 

Secret scriptures like the furrows in the earth.

But also, the secret and cheerful writing, almost a handwriting of the heart, of the little priests in a circle holding hands. Regardless of the sufferings of love beyond the walls of the seminary. 

“... add reality
to reality, that time
which is inside the image
and that belongs only to the
photography, that time
that everything changes
but nothing destroys.”

This is what I meant at the beginning by “poetics”.

Giacomelli is our pride for the poetic depth that he has introduced into Photography.

The way he told us about the Time.

He called himself a “realist” photographer, but his shots go far beyond simple reality, but penetrate it like the furrows of a plow.

Even when they appear to be graphic signs with no link with reality, like the pretini in a circle.

So, we have to go back to that title, to that absence of hands that caress the face.

And reality re-emerges to the surface, in all its poignant beauty.

 

Thanks, Giacomelli, for making all of us, with your photographs, travelers of sensations in unknown lands.

“I would not like to repeat the visible things,

but make them visible, internalized,

I wish I could slip under the skin of things,

to be able to show the energy that passes between my soul

and the things around me.”

(Mario Giacomelli)

Mario Giacomelli. “The great landscapes series”, 1980/1985

Mario Giacomelli: “I have no hands that caress my face” (Photology, 2009)
Vincenzo Marzocchini: “around a poem by Mario Giacomelli” (Polyorama Edizioni, 2012)

Italian version