Mario Giacomelli

Mario Giacomelli (Senigallia, 1 August 1925 – Senigallia, 25 November 2000) was an Italian photographer.

Giacomelli was a self-taught photographer. At 13, he left high school, began working as a typesetter and spent his weekends painting. After the horrors of World War II, he turned to the more immediate medium of photography. 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, eventually developing a style characterized by bold compositions and stark contrasts. In 1955 he was discovered in Italy by Paolo Monti, and beginning in 1963, became known in the USA through John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.[1]

One of Giacomelli's most iconic images, Scanno Boy (1957) is of a group of women walking towards the observer with only one single and central object in focus: a boy walking with his hands in his pockets. Szarkowski included the image in his book Looking at Photographs (1973).[1] In 2013 the name of the boy has been revealed to be Claudio De Cola by Simona Guerra, researcher and niece of Giacomelli. On October 19, 1957, the day Giacomelli took the photograph, De Cola was emerging from the Church of Sant'Antonio in Padua like many of the people around him, after the Mass. De Cola, now in his sixties and no longer a resident of Scanno, recognised himself in the picture. Further evidence was provided by his mother Teopista, who produced several other pictures of the boy.

Apart from Scanno, Giacomelli's most successful series are The Landscapes (1954-2000) and I Pretini (Little Priests) (1961-1963), a transcription of the everyday life of a group of young priests, resulted from documenting post-war Italian seminaries.

Bibliography

Collections

Giacomelli's work is held in the following permanent collections:

References

  1. 1 2 Lynne Warren (2005). Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography. Routledge. p. 602. ISBN 9781135205430.
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