JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by Skinnerboox (here). Softcover with Swiss binding, 24 x 28 cm, 108 pages, with 40 black-and-white reproductions and 14 contact sheet pages. Includes essays in Italian/English by Katiuscia Biondi Giacomelli, Brad Feuerhelm, Davide Rondoni, and Francesco Zanot. Design by CH-RO-MO. (Cover and spread shots below.)
An exhibition of this body of work was on view at MUFOCO (the Museo di Fotografia Contempoeranea in Milan) earlier this year (here).
Comments/Context: An artist’s late work, meaning those artworks made in the last few years of his or her life, is often discounted by critics and curators. The usual logic is that failing health, worsening eyesight, or the many other realities of aging may have affected his or her output, in ways that make it hard to separate artistic intention from the simple instincts of living. Did an artist pare back to essentials because she wanted to, or because she could no longer see well? Did he get more expressive and improvisational on purpose, or could he no longer be as precise as he once was? Was there a summing up of ideas and artistic lessons learned, or merely an ongoing progression or evolution? The answers to these and other questions are often less than entirely known, leaving us with mysteries that linger long after the artist has passed away.
This thin photobook brings together photographs made by Mario Giacomelli in the last several years of his life, after the then fragile master Italian photographer had recovered from an operation. Giacomelli died in 2000, and this group of test prints was discovered after his death, providing a fuller picture of his late work. Giacomelli called the project Questo ricordo lo vorrei raccontare (“I would like to tell you about this memory” in English), and the images were staged at various abandoned houses in the hills above Senigallia, Italy, where the photographer lived and worked for most of his artistic life.
Over his long career, Giacomelli developed a unique photographic aesthetic, full of extreme contrasts of light and dark. His farm country landscapes from the 1950s (and on into later decades) are some of his best known works, with furrowed fields drawn out into striated geometries, with dark stubble intermingled with lighter plowed areas, like lines and stitched patterns on the earth. He applied a similar eye to a group of priests in the 1960s, who were memorably seen dancing in a circle and standing in layered groups, silhouetted against a snowy backdrop. But those pictures really only scratch the surface of Giacomelli’s art; he worked across many genres during his career – still lifes, nudes, portraiture, images of his family (and aging more generally), Italian city scenes, aerial landscapes, seaside views – applying his signature self-taught aesthetics with increasing levels of expressive innovation over the years, via blur, multiple exposure, shadow play, distortion, and other less identifiable methods and approaches.
The title of this project comes from an inked caption Giacomelli scrawled across a self-portrait made just after his operation. In the image, the artist is gaunt and frail, looking into the camera, his long white hair falling around his face as he holds his collar. As memories go, the moment captured in the photograph isn’t particularly warm and inviting, but perhaps instead an instant of hollow-eyed stubborn survival, sparked with a restless desire to tell more visual stories. The project that emerged afterward is in many ways Giacomelli’s most autobiographical, while also embracing a more intuitively surreal and fantastical kind of staging than he had ever attempted before.
In scale and scope, Giacomelli’s efforts were entirely modest. He drove up to various empty houses in the hills above his home, and took with him in the trunk of his car an oddball assortment of available props: some rubber masks, a black hat, some white bed sheets, some plastic sheeting, the bottom half of a mannequin, a white teddy bear, a folding canvas chair, various articles of clothing (including a woman’s bra), a selection of carved birds (doves, pigeons, crows, and the like), an umbrella, some picture frames, and an ever changing assortment of available dogs and cats. To these he added whatever he found at the houses: a wheelbarrow, a garden hose, some metal rings and circles (perhaps wine barrel hoops or wheels), a shovel, a wooden chair, a long chain, some sections of iron fence, and a number of long wooden sticks. And so he began to play, staging setups that he then photographed iteratively, often with his own figure or face included in the mix.
Giacomelli later said that he had “descended into myself and re-emerged purified”, and the images he crafted in his last years certainly have a sense of inventive personal theatricality, stylistically akin to unconscious hallucinations or Fellini-esque flights of fancy. If there is any consistent narrative throughline to be found in these pictures, it is likely one of the artist wrestling with his own ghosts and memories. He offers us shadowy figures and disembodied mask heads that might be a mother or father, and Giacomelli himself enters the frame now and again, as a fleeting or blurred presence, a masked figure, a tumbled body, a silhouette, or even fully nude in one sequence. The photographs seem to document a dream-like spirit world, where symbols, resonant objects, and fragments of memory wander about and tussle for coherence. Giacomelli has clearly let his imagination run loose, creating dark mysteries and participatory inventions that only he can likely decode. Death seems to linger somewhere nearby, giving the entire project a feeling of requiem or final accounting, with Giacomelli poetically concocting worlds that hint at essences, thoughts, reflections, and confessions.
Aesthetically, there are plenty of signature Giacomelli visual effects to be found in these photographs. Extreme contrasts of light and dark can be found in nearly every composition – white walls, dark doorways, white sheets, dark clothing, white birds, dark trees, the scenes are filled with oscillating tones and details that pop with vibrancy. Wooden frames and metal hoops are decoratively deployed to amplify sets of overlapped geometries, with available walls, windows, and doorways providing the compositional foundation. Giacomelli also brings the undulations of landscape into some of his setups, and adds sticks, dry vines, tree branches, and even loops of chain and garden hose as mark making tools. Bold silhouettes and shadows are repeated elements, set off by the eerie presence of a mask, an animal, a bird, or a blurred figure.
All of this comes together in scenes that seem perched on the edge of a very specific kind of Italian madness, with echoes of the masked psychologies of Ralph Eugene Meatyard and the unsettled energies of Roger Ballen. Some of the strongest scenes are cluttered from edge to edge with competing elements, seemingly swirled together with manic expressiveness and improvisational experimentation. In particular, the sequential nature of the test prints allows us to watch as Giacomelli tries one arrangement and then iteratively modifies it again and again in search of just the right balance (or imbalance). His measured inventiveness is impressive, with ideas morphing and reforming from frame to frame, especially as seen in the gridded examples in the back of the photobook. Props are deployed and rearranged, figures enter and exit, and photographic effects like blurs or multiple exposures are added to enhance the desired mood. Not every frame finds memorable coherence, but the total sum of the ideas on display feels brimming with intense bouts of inspiration.
As an artistic project, Questo ricordo lo vorrei raccontare is loose, messy, uncontrolled, and at times incomprehensible, which is part of why it is so compelling. We often talk about how younger photographers are working to find and refine their artistic voices; in this case, we have a master photographer at the end of his career letting it all hang out, embracing his own idiosyncratic voice with unembarrassed quirkiness and sensitivity. As dark and haunted as some of these pictures are, their unabashed freedom is entrancing. Giacomelli lays bare his inner turmoils, making himself wholly visible in ways most of us resist. Questo ricordo lo vorrei raccontare is a weird and wonderful final chapter, made by an artist still gripped by the elusive process of turning life into photography.
Collector’s POV: While many 20th century photography dealers have secondary market access to prints by Mario Giacomelli, the photographer’s archive (here) is the only authorized representative of the estate. Giacomelli’s work is routinely available at auction, with prices in the past decade ranging between roughly $1000 and $24000.