Artist of the day: Artist of the day, November 22 (Italia week): Mario Giacomelli, Italian photographer and photojournalist

Mario Giacomelli (1925 – 2000) was born in Senigallia in the Marche region of Italy into a family of modest means. Only nine when his father died, at 13, the boy left high school to work as a typesetter and spent his weekends painting and writing poetry. After the horrors of World War II, from 1953 he turned to the more immediate medium of photography and joined the Misa Group, 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 in the outside Italy through John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Giacomelli's technique is distinctive. After beginning with the popular and robust Comet 127 film-format viewfinder camera, in 1954 he bought a second-hand Kobell, a larger coupled rangefinder camera for 6x9 plates and film and modified it himself. He was unafraid of exploiting the double-exposure capability of its Compur shutter, as well as soft focus, camera movement and slow shutter speeds. His images are high-contrast and are the result of using electronic flash, from overdevelopment of his film and compensatory heavy printing so that nearly-black forms 'float' against a white ground. In accounting for these choices he referred to his printing-industry and graphic arts training; "For me the photographic film is like a printing plate, a lithograph, where images and emotions become stratified."

Giacomelli photographed the simple lives of the poor of southern Italy, in 1957 and 1959 visiting Scanno “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.”

In 1964 his work 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.

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 & 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.

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