MARIO GIACONELLI

1 August 1925 – 25 November 2000

Biography

Giacomelli was born in the sea-port town of 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.

Giacomelli’s technique is distinctive. After beginning with the popular and robust Comet 127 film-format viewfinder camera, made in Italy by CMF Bencini from 1948 into the 1950s, in 1954 he bought a second-hand Kobell, a larger coupled rangefinder camera for 6x9 plates and film, one of only about 400 made by Boniforti and Ballerio in Milan from about 1952, 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, quite unlike the modulated full tonal range of his mentor Cavalli, 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.” After 1986, especially in his 1992-3 series Il pittore Bastari (‘The painter Bastari’) he artificially included consciously symbolic cardboard masks and toy dogs.tailors; Capa’s mother was a successful fashion shop owner, and his father was an employee of her shop. Capa had two brothers: a younger brother, photographer Cornell Capa and an older brother, László Friedmann. Cornell moved to Paris in 1936 to join his older brother Capa, where he found an interest in photography instead of staying in the field of medicine. Not much is known of Capa’s older brother László, except that he married Angela Maria Friedmann-Csordas in 1933. He died a year later and was buried next to his father in the Kozma Utca Jewish Cemetery.

At the age of 18, Capa moved to Vienna, later relocated to Prague, and finally settled in Berlin: all cities that were centers of artistic and cultural ferment in this period. He started studies in journalism at the German Political College, but the Nazi Party instituted restrictions on Jews and banned them from colleges. Capa relocated to Paris, where he adopted the name ‘Robert Capa’ in 1934. At that time, he had already been a hobbyphotographer.

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.

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 outside Italy through John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Giacomelli was inspired by the literature of Cesare Pavese, Giacomo Leopardi (a native of Giacomelli’s region) and the postwar existentialist Eugenio Montale, giants of Italian writing, from which he often borrowed titles for his picture series, such as the confronting, unsentimental pictures he made (1955–57) in an old-people’s home, where his mother worked as a washer-woman; Verrà la more e avrà i tuoi occhi (‘Death will come and will have your eyes’), taken from a Pavese poem. He wrote his own poetry and his pictures are a reflection of their visual language. Like other members of Misa, Giacomelli photographed the simple lives of the poor of southern Italy, in 1957 and 1959 visiting Scanno, a small town in the Abruzzii region which Henri Cartier-Bresson had visited only five years before to make quite different pictures.