Mario Giacomelli

A new look at the work of Mario Giacomelli, one of Italy’s foremost photographers of the twentieth century.

Mario Giacomelli (1925–2000) was born into poverty and lived his entire life in Senigallia, a seaside town along the Adriatic coast in Italy’s Marche region. He purchased his first camera in 1953 and quickly gained recognition for the raw expressiveness of his images. His preference for grainy, high-contrast film and paper produced bold, geometric compositions with glowing whites and deep blacks. Giacomelli most frequently focused his camera on the people, landscapes, and seascapes of the Marche, and he often spent several years expanding and reinterpreting a single body of work or repurposing an image made for one series for inclusion in another. By applying titles derived from poetry and literature to his photographs, he transformed ordinary subjects into meditations on time, memory, and existence.

Spanning the photographer’s earliest pictures to those made in the final years of his life, this publication celebrates the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extensive Giacomelli holdings, formed in large part through a significant gift from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 29 to October 10, 2021.

Mario Giacomelli left us in 2000 with two different archives with his work one in Sassoferrato and one in Senigallia. Since 2007, the heirs of Mario Giacomelli became directors of the photographic heritage, taking over the management from Photology in Milan.

In this book, Giacomelli's granddaughter reveals some images of the Sassoferrato archive that contains about 12,000 photographs and the techniques the photographer used.

In this wonderful book Mario Giacomelli’s most appreciated collection of landscapes, street scenes, still life, and portraits of everyday Italian life are combined with a unique and unseen new series.

Born in 1925, Mario Giacomelli died in November 2000. He trained initially as a typographer, and his early interest in graphics became a central part of his later photographic work. Winner of numerous medals and prizes, he achieved international status with exhibitions in Europe, America and Japan.

He was intimately involved in the preparation of this book, which was the last major project he undertook, and represents the best of his long career as a photographer and artist. This comprehensive survey demonstrates Giacomelli's highly personal, striking and artistically atmospheric visual style. Each chapter is a carefully chosen sequence of photographs on a particular theme (some with accompanying poems which inspired the sequence).