The art of the photographer Mario Giacomelli (Senigallia, 1925 – 2000) It was a continuous challenge, despite international awards and a conclated success, and continues to be in this 2025, in which the centenary occurs from birth. It is the consequence of the singularity of his photographs, still today of extraordinary modernity (despite the “ancient” means used) and capable of arousing ever new discussions, confirmed by the Two (complementary) exhibitions in progress in Milan (Palazzo Reale, until 7 September) and Rome (Palazzo delle Esposizioni, until August 3).
In Milan the exhibition «Mario Giacomelli. The photographer and the poet “is promoted by the Municipality of Milan – Culture and is produced by Palazzo Reale and Mario Giacomelli archive, in collaboration with Rjma Cultural Projects and Silvana Editoriale. The title of the Rome exhibition is “the photographer and the artist”. Both are curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Katiuscia Biondi Giacomelli. If in the capital the relationship between the photographer (who was also a painter and poet, as well as professional printer) and the visual arts of his contemporary, in Milan, the path focused on the relationship with poetry, including, among other things, the famous series inspired by Leopardi, Spoon River, Cardarelli, Montale, Permunian (above all) and to the Calabrian Franco Costabile, is also reconstructed in the capital.
Why do the images of Giacomelli continue to be a challenge still today? His style was and remains very personal, flies high on all the methodological and conceptual issues of photography and exceeds them. He is neither realistic nor documentary, if anything he seeks everything behind the visible reality. It gives body to that feeling that sometimes everyone happens to have a landscape, a house, a group of people, when it seems to grasp what is not explicitly shown or said. What apparently impossible to do with photography, yet he succeeds, gives body to thoughts, impressions, not fully perceived. Adopt Mische, crook shots, chooses objects without making them immediately perceptible, in the dark room cuts the film, sometimes it overlaps it, makes the times of the impression on paper irregular, adopters masks, always creates something that is not what is expected from a canonical photography, that is, perfectly defined and by the shot that balances everything, subjects or objects that are.
His is our world but it is also another world (and another way), where emotions miraculously appear on paper. His impressions gradually become ours also, if as soon as we enter in tune with his thoughts, which might seem lateral and instead points straight to the center of everything. That’s why his photograph as an irregular artist goes perfectly with poetry: sought, studied, lived (even in first person, as well as painting, often made with fabrics, not by chance informal, the result of friendship with Alberto Burri), explored in his most placed center to make it become “flesh” through the images that ever illustrate it but always walk alongside them parallel to others, Accompanying now by meeting (but also colliding), with the use of images that those verses reflect, without ever there being an effective and easy identification, less than less superimpositions.
Perhaps the photographs become sharp blades that discuss with those other sharp blades that are the verses, until they contaminate each other (the image) with those (the verses) in a sort of mutual contribution, which brings together realities and metaphysics in an almost magical combination. Even his most famous series (early sixties), known as that of the “Pretini”, has as its title “I have no hands that cares about my face”, taken from a verse of Father Davide Maria Turoldo (priest and extraordinary poet) and prepared after three years of attending the seminary of Senigallia (the photos cost the place to the rector) to understand “the air that circulates”, to always go further. “I don’t care so much – he said – document what is happening, as to pass into what is happening”.
Here those seminarians intent on playing on the snow, which at first glance may seem bearers of simple gestures, at a more careful look become an expression of a whole world, the one without caresses of the title, far away as they are from home, and through the cut of the films, the deliberately wrong exposure and other precautions, dilate towards emotions that are no longer theirs, but they become our own (each with their own). A beyond, which perhaps we are not prepared by going to visit an exhibition that we believe in photographs.
Giacomelli, exhibited at the MoMa of New York and in an incredible series of museums all over the world, has always remained faithful to his research, however changing the subjects (from the aated fields seen from the top to the elderly hospitalized in a hospice) and obeying always different sensations and in any case linked to the inexpressible. It also happened to him in Calabria, in the eighties, when he went to photograph the Aspromonte, inspired by the poems “The song of the new emigrants” by Franco Costabile. He visited Cutro, Pentedattilo (of which he underlined being an abandoned and alive place at the same time), Caraffa, Tiriolo and Copanello. He managed to photograph the lack, the absence, the one that, full of anger, was in the verses of Costabile. “Words as pieces of Reale – wrote Katiuscia Biondi Giacomelli -, as are the photographs of Giacomelli: decontextualized, shattered, deformed subjects, reconstructed in a new order, his”.
But it is not his own: within those faces and those places there is the invitation, as always, to make one of our order, passing through the door of his “magical realism” (so it has been defined), an opportunity perhaps to discover ourselves better.