Mario Giacomelli: Des Oiseaux
Photographer, painter and poet Mario Giacomelli bought his first camera in the early 1950s and immediately began to explore the relationship between photography and painting. He soon created his own darkroom, where his choice of high contrast paper helped shape the unmistakable visual language that would define his work.
Through camera movement, blurred focus and dramatic contrasts of light and shadow, Giacomelli created images suspended between reality and dream. Figures appear and disappear like fleeting visions, while his instinct for lyrical abstraction, also central to his painting, emerges throughout his photographs. Light becomes almost graphic, revealing not only the world before the camera but also the photographer’s inner emotional landscape.
Deeply connected to his native Marche region, Giacomelli repeatedly turned his attention to its rural landscapes. He photographed vast fields cut by ploughed furrows, long shadows stretching across the earth and the façades of country houses. Within these landscapes, birds, clouds, faces and unexpected shapes emerge as fragile presences. Birds rise from thick vegetation, appear as silhouettes against pale surfaces, dissolve into clouds or become small, almost abstract signs within the image.
Flocks of white birds seem to echo the lines of leaves and branches, allowing the animal and plant worlds to merge. Suspended between appearance and disappearance, reality and imagination, Giacomelli’s birds resemble calligraphic marks scattered across the landscape, as though composing a visual score.
For this volume, Jean Noël Rieffel, veterinarian and regional director of the French Office for Biodiversity in Centre Val de Loire, contributes to the Des oiseaux series for the first time. His text creates a dialogue between Giacomelli’s photographs and ornithology, with particular attention to larids, including gulls and seagulls, and corvids, birds that repeatedly attracted the photographer’s eye.
About the Author
Mario Giacomelli was born in Senigallia in 1925 and remained closely tied to the city until his death in 2000. Trained as a typographer, he discovered photography in 1953 and quickly developed a radical and highly personal style defined by extreme contrasts, bold compositions and an intuitive, emotional approach to the medium.
Moving freely between documentary observation and visual poetry, Giacomelli created a number of series that have become landmarks in the history of photography, including Scanno, La Buona Terra, Io non ho mani che mi accarezzino il volto and Paesaggio. His prints reflect a profound rejection of photographic neutrality. For Giacomelli, the image was always a space of poetic involvement, where personal experience could open onto something universal.
His photographs are held in major international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Photo Elysée in Lausanne and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
