Mario Giacomelli
Gelatin silver print
Photography part of series "Hospice life"
mm 300×400
Photographer's copyright stamp on verso
Da Archivio Mario Giacomelli:
Between 1955 and 1957 Mario Giacomelli produced a series of shots entitled Vita d'ospizio (Hospice Life), the first part of a cycle that he considered to be his most important work, to which he would return several times during his lifetime (1966-1968 and 1981-1983):
Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi is the series named after the poem of the same name by Cesare Pavese. Composed during Mario Giacomelli's second photo session in the Senigallia hospice (1966/68), it was also expanded with photos from the previous session ('54/56).
"Of all the things I have done I think this is the most interesting research; in fact, I have felt more emotions being in contact with this environment than in all the other research put together. [...] Why? After having struggled all my life, why does the end of a life have to be this, why does it have to end up in these environments, in these screwed-up institutions?
[...] These photos are more realistic, even in the technique, I chose a different way of printing [contrasting print on extra vigorous paper], there is an essential cut, which you also find in the other images, these are simply more real than the others. More than what I had before my eyes, I wanted to render what I had inside of me, what was born inside as I settled into these things: this fear of growing old, not of dying, this disgust for the price with which a life is paid.
[...] I made sure I was one of them, like them, no longer feeling the camera on them.".
(A. C. Quintavalle, Mario Giacomelli, Feltrinelli, Milan 1980).
"The photos at the hospice are my father's way of penetrating the real, right down to under those exhausted meats bitten by close-up shots and inside those sheets corroded by the flash by the eating whites, in the pain and loneliness of those poor people abandoned to themselves in their last years of life. The closed blacks that look like abysses over which the old women are about to fall, make one feel how great the loneliness is.
I remember, although I was only a few years old at the time, my grandmother Libera who was a laundress at the hospice in Senigallia, sometimes she would take me with her. I would go with her into an immense, cold, damp room. I remember the water that was on the floor, a lot of it, it was the water leaking from the laundry tubs. There were several washbasins in the room, each woman had her own with a wooden platform so that her feet wouldn't be soaking. In one corner were mountains of sheets soiled with sweat and excrement and the stench mixed with the smell of soap. The washerwomen had no gloves and the water certainly wasn't hot. I remember these sheets being forcibly lifted from the tub and slammed onto the rack to be rubbed, the splashes coming from all sides. Even though I was small, I felt a feeling of pity seeing my grandmother there in front of that 'trocco' (platform), as she called it, and she seemed so small and helpless". (Rita Giacomelli, unpublished notes)
Giacomelli had seen the same scenes long before, as a child, when his mother Libera took him to work with her, having been widowed at a very young age. He returned to the hospice, some ten years between sessions, for the rest of his life (1955, 1966, 1981). In 1986 his mother died, and perhaps that is why he did not return to photography in the 1990s, but he nevertheless continued with photographs from 1981, two more series E io ti vidi fanciulla and La zia di Franco, as if it were a ritual, to honour his mother or perhaps just to feel her still close.
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Biography
Mario Giacomelli (August 1, 1925, Senigallia, Italy - November 25, 2000, same location) is an Italian painter, poet and photographer. In 1934, her father died and her mother became a laundress in an old people's home. He worked in 1938 in a printing house and took a strong interest in typographical characters. During the war, the printing press was destroyed, but he rebuilt it, worked there, and during his free time, painted abstract compositions (from which emerges a certain materiality). Also, he launches himself with great interest in poetry and in motor racing. In 1952, a serious accident during a race convinced him to give up this passion. He bought his first camera and immediately felt a link between it and his practice as a painter. He tinkers with his camera, sets up his photography lab and chooses to use contrasting paper from the start in his work. He meets Giuseppe Cavalli thanks to which he joins an amateur photography group: MISA where personalities are present: Piergiorgio Branzi (it), Alfredo Camisa (it), Silvio Pellegrini (es). He returned to the hospice where he worked in photography for three years (Vie d'hospice) while also being interested in photographs of landscapes and still lifes as well as the exploitation of chance. In 1955 he won first prize at the national exhibition in Castelfranco Veneto. He says that "the most beautiful pictures are, perhaps, the ones that we don't take, because if we had taken them, we would have ruined something". He (always alone) undertakes short trips to Scanno, Peschici and Lourdes. At the start of the sixties, he met Luigi Crocenzi, in accordance with his desire for narrative photography. In 1963, John Szarkowski, director of the Department of Photography at the New York Museum of Modern Art, purchased his photos from Scanno for the collection of masters of international photography. A year later, he produced a new series of photographs devoted to the seasons and the land. For a year, he follows the rhythm of life of a peasant family (harvests, festivals, harvests, etc.). Then, he makes visits to the hospice and changes the title of his work: Death will come who will have your eyes. He photographs cut tree trunks in a quest for abstraction and produces a series of color photographs: Le Chantier du paysage by linking poetry and abstract painting to photography. from 1969 to 1980, he was particularly interested in lyrical abstraction and carried out various series. He continued his lyric poems and worked on Le Rêve (recit.). In 1997 he decorated the Italian coffee cups of the Illy collection. His sources of inspiration are, among others, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Osvaldo Licini, Giorgio Morandi, Robert Rauschenberg and Barnett Newman..
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