The exhibition, hosted from 13 December 2024 to 6 April 2025 in the historic Palazzo del Duca, offers an immersion in Giacomelli's imagination and technique. The exhibition opens with a multimedia installation entitled Sotto la pelle del reale, which reproduces the artist's creative flow. Visitors will be guided by his own voice, taken from an interview for Radio 3 Suite in 2000, while moving images and written fragments of thoughts alternate, evoking his profound and poetic vision of photography as a means of exploring reality and interiority: here, the images, in their metamorphoses, follow the same movements of the vertical surges and falls into the void with which Giacomelli chased the Infinite and imitate his gestures in the darkroom, at the enlarger, with the sensitive paper held obliquely to immerse the world in vertigo.
The heart of the exhibition is the darkroom, the place where Giacomelli gave shape to his imagination, transforming matter into powerful and universal visions. In addition to the works on display, there are original equipment, such as his Kobell camera, and props used for his shots. Alongside these, test prints, handwritten notes and interviews document the artist’s creative process, showing his incessant experimentation and the continuous transformation of reality.
The exhibition brings together around one hundred original photographs, including vintage and period prints, spanning Giacomelli’s entire production, from the 1950s to 2000, the year of his death. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between photography and poetry, a founding element of the artist’s work: poetry as a sounding board for his emotions, which emerge in the form of photographic images. Works such as Io non ho mani che mi accarezzino il volto (I have no hands to caress my face), inspired by the texts of Father David Maria Turoldo from which the famous photographic series Pretini of 1961 originates and which opens the exhibition, Passato (1986) by Cardarelli and Spoon River Anthology (1971-73) by Edgar Lee Masters, testify to how poetry has always represented for Giacomelli an inexhaustible source of inspiration and introspection, a means to explore the essence of man and the world.
Through a narrative that intertwines key themes of Giacomelli’s poetics, the exhibition path – divided into eight thematic rooms – represents Mario Giacomelli’s inner world, the emergence of a deep and ancestral world that manifests itself in a continuous flow of images like words in a long speech. A story that, although starting from autobiographical vicissitudes, speaks with the ancient and infinite voice of humanity. In his works, anthropomorphized landscapes become human portraits, intertwining memory and matter in a continuous dialogue. The maternal figure, evoked through symbolic elements, emerges as a constant and founding presence of his artistic vision. Light, an essential element of his work, interrupts the darkness to illuminate small and precious fragments of reality, offering a vision that oscillates between the immense and the intimate, between the concrete and the metaphorical.
The darkroom returns again, at the end of the journey, in the photographic reproductions commissioned by Guido Harari for the editorial project “Nella camera oscura di Mario Giacomelli. L’antro dello sciamano” (Rizzoli Lizard, 2024), created in collaboration with the Archivio Mario Giacomelli di Rita and Simone Giacomelli. A work of recovery and memory of a magical place defined by Harari himself as “the shaman’s den”. Giacomelli’s Darkroom is not just an exhibition, but a journey into the creative universe of an artist who was able to speak to the soul of man through photography, transforming each image into a fragment of interiority and poetry.
As part of the Celebrations for the First Centenary of the Birth of Mario Giacomelli, which will begin in 2025, the Mario Giacomelli Archive, within a more complex and articulated program, will give shape to a series of major exhibitions that document the entire production of the great photographer and update his critical interpretation. The first two important exhibitions will be those in Rome and Milan; the first in Rome at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, from 17 April to 1 September 2025, followed shortly thereafter by that of Palazzo Reale, in Milan, from 24 May to 21 September 2025, to continue with an exhibition calendar that will touch various national and international venues and conclude in 2027.
The exhibition was created as part of the Senigallia City of Photography project promoted by the Marche Region and was organized by the Municipality of Senigallia and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Jesi.
Mario Giacomelli
Mario Giacomelli was born in 1925 in Senigallia, in the Marche region, a city from which he would never part, so the world of art would join him over the years in Tipografia Marchigiana, his since 1950. He began taking photographs in 1953 under the wing of the master Giuseppe Cavalli, an erudite photographer and photography critic in Italy in the 1940s and 1950s. Founder of the La Bussola movement (Milan 1947) and supporter of photography as a story and as art, he recognized in Giacomelli a new and strong character that would leave a mark on the history of photography. From the very beginning, an anarchic creator of a language all his own made of contrasts and dissonances, a mirror of his interiority, Giacomelli appeared shocking in his gaze on the landscape and on the delicate themes of humanity, so much so that Paolo Monti in 1955 defined him as "the new man of photography": his "magical realism" surpassed the neorealist vision in which Italian photography had run aground, enriching it with an intimate and truthful, material expressionism. Followed and encouraged by critics, widely present in specialized magazines, he soon became a point of reference for Italian photographers of the Sixties and still today a source of inspiration for photographers from all over the world. In 1964, he was the only Italian selected for The photographer's eye, the exhibition curated by John Szarkowski for the MOMA in New York, acquiring his works for the museum's permanent collection. In 1965 Giacomelli sent the entire A Silvia series to the equally prestigious George Eastman House in Rochester (NY), where he exhibited in a personal anthology in 1968, presented the following year in various cities in the United States. Those would be the first stages of an unstoppable rise, while the major museums in the world included works by Mario Giacomelli in their permanent collections. In 1978 he was invited to exhibit his landscape photography at the Venice Biennale Dalla natura all’arte, dall’arte alla natura. Giacomelli's definitive consecration in Italy came in 1980, when the CSAC in Parma dedicated a retrospective to him. Active until the end, without ever ceasing to experiment with photography, he passed away in 2000.
