"Mario Giacomelli photographs at the Senigallia hospice"
Emidio Angelini - Righetti Collection Bern
"If everything you have experienced can be expressed in words, you have not lived."
Claudio Righetti with Mario Giacomelli at the Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne 1993 on the occasion of the vernissage of his large retrospective.
The signature of Mario Giacomelli
Insight into the Righetti Collection at photoSCHWEIZ 2025
"Our collection consistently and almost obsessively follows Mario Giacomelli's handwriting by illuminating his working methods and emphasizing his artistic uniqueness and significance. With the collector's eye, it documents the creation of individual pictures and picture cycles that are in a continuous relationship to each other and convey a view of Giacomelli's work that focuses on his inner life. "
Mario Giacomelli (1925-2000) is considered the most internationally influential Italian photographer. Over the course of his career, he developed a personal approach to the lyrical power of photography, focusing on important life themes such as the passage of time, memory, the earth, suffering and love.
Giacomelli discovered the camera as an ideal means of expression when he took his first pictures on Christmas Day 1952 on the beach at Senigallia in the Italian Marche region with a Comet Bencini "S" he had bought the day before, which - after using a Voigtländer Bessa II in the meantime - he was to replace definitively with the legendary and inseparable Kobell Press at the end of 1956.
One of the results is L'approdo (washed up), an image of the shore washed by a wave, reminiscent of a moving brushstroke. After his first attempts, Giacomelli develops photographic series in the form of stories told through images, where his aim is not to repeat the visible, but to get under the skin of reality, that is, to make visible the energy between his soul and the things that surround him. In his own words:
"I am interested in a reality that breathes, that remains in motion, because I am telling something that is meaningful when the image is separated from its original intention and placed in spaces controlled by my own sensibility, where everything seems to be imbued with a new flow."
In 1953, at the age of 28, Mario Giacomelli was accepted as a founding member of the MISA photography group by Giuseppe Cavalli, who was already a respected photographer and personality in Italian photography at the time. In 1955, Paolo Monti called him the "new man of Italian photography" because he recognized that Giacomelli had overcome the neo-realist vision in which Italian photography was "trapped".
In March 1956, Giacomelli briefly joined the group La Bussola (the Compass), which had also been founded by Cavalli in Milan in 1947 with the aim of promoting photography as art from a professional point of view and not just as documentation - entirely in the spirit of renewal. However, internal disputes led to a break between the photographers Cavalli and Crocenzi in the same year and to the final dissolution of both the MISA group and La Bussola in 1957.
In April of the same year, the first International Biennale of Photography opens in Venice, organized by the Circolo Fotografico la Gondola, the Swiss magazine Camera and Crocenzi's Centro per la Cultura nella Fotografia (CCF) - a groundbreaking exhibition event for the time, with photographs by the most important reporters of the Magnum agency (including Werner Bischof, Robert Capa, Eugene Smith and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had already exhibited in Milan and Bologna in 1956) and the representatives of German Expressionism under Otto Steinert.
Against this backdrop, Giacomelli's first photo series Vita d'ospizio (Life in the Hospice), set in the Senigallia hospice where his mother had worked for years as a laundress, marked a decisive turning point in his work.
From the mid-1950s, Giacomelli won his first photography awards. Among other things, he took part in group exhibitions, many of which were dedicated to humanist photography in the post-war period, such as the exhibition Was ist der Mensch, which began in Frankfurt and then traveled internationally.
Despite his reclusive lifestyle, Giacomelli took part in the first exhibition of Italian photography in the USA in 1957, which was held at the renowned George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. There he showed one of his first landscape photographs, which would later become world-famous.
Also shown at George Eastman House in 1968 was his entire series A Silvia, created in 1964 for RAI based on the poem of the same name by Giacomo Leopardi (Giacomelli followed the script of photography history theorist Luigi Crocenzi). The exhibition can be seen the following year in various cities in the USA.
Lamberto Vitali introduced Mario Giacomelli at the Milan Triennale in 1960, and the influential photo art historian and curator John Szarkowski presented Scanno, one of Giacomelli's most famous photo cycles, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York immediately after its arrival in 1963. In 1964, Szarkowski selected Giacomelli as the only Italian for the exhibition The Photographers Eye, which he curated. At the same time, the MOMA acquired works by him for its permanent collection.
Otto Steinert had already included photographs by Giacomelli in his Subjective Photography in 1962, and Karl Pawek showed works by Giacomelli both in the magazine Magnum and in his Totale Fotografie.
Bill Brandt and Mark Haworth-Booth selected works by Giacomelli for their groundbreaking exhibition The Land at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1975, and in 1978 he was invited to exhibit his landscape photographs at the Venice Biennale under the title From Nature to Art - From Art to Nature.
Giacomelli's final recognition in Italy came in 1980, when the Italian art historian Arturo Carlo Quintavalla dedicated a retrospective to him at the CSAC - the Centro studi e archvio della communicazione of the University of Parma - which was accompanied by a scholarly catalog.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the self-taught photographer Mario Giacomelli became one of the most distinctive and influential photographers on the international photography and art scene. In addition to numerous other awards, Giacomelli received the Culture Prize of the German Photographic Society in 1995 - accompanied by the retrospective Mario Giacomelli, Photographs 1952-1995 at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (catalog by Karl Steinorth).
Giacomelli's works can be found in collections and museums all over the world, including the MOMA, the Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Ludwig Collection, and in Switzerland in the collection of the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne (partly through donations from the Righetti Collection in 1988 and 1993) and the Fotostiftung Schweiz, to name but a few.
Unimpressed by this, Mario Giacomelli changed neither his habits nor his behavior: He remained in Senigallia his entire life, experimenting with photography until his death in November 2000. Perhaps this is why there is still so much to discover about him on his 100th birthday, about his incomparable way of working, the complexity of his thinking and the diversity of his photographic oeuvre.
No one had a better feel for lines, for the filigree, for surfaces and structures, for the variety of white, gray and black tones in nature. And that makes his work unique in every respect.