Mario Giacomelli

Born in 1925 in Senigallia (IT)
Died in 2000 in Senigallia (IT)

Sans titre

1977-1980
Black and white photograph, gelatin-silver print
59 x 46 cm
Year of Purchase: 1985

Mario Giacomelli was a quintessential figure in the world of postwar photography. He is best known for a body of works, particularly landscapes, in which he made a radical break with the ‘modernist’ aesthetics then in force in the world of photography. After a period markedly inspired by Italian neo-realism, whose expressionist graphic qualities he borrowed more than anything else, Mario Giacomelli became involved in a study of traditional life as lived in certain isolated villages. The land and the task of working it, as bequeathed to already elderly men and women, attest to a humanism tinged with sadness at the erosion of a certain way of life confronted by modernism. Slowly, however, Giacomelli developed a more abstract style in which, through the magic of framing using high angle shots, landscapes became both depictions of land use in Italy and actual photographic ‘paintings’, no less, with abstract signs. This development culminated quite naturally in the series Storie della Terra (Tales of the Earth). The two pictures in the Frac’s collection show the degree to which the photographer’s graphic work took precedence, ending with images that were all the more ambivalent because Giacomelli then played with all the signs usually allocated to European abstract painting in the immediate postwar years.

^{Damien Sausset}