By Alistair Crawford, with an interview by Alessandra Mauro
The Book
This is the most comprehensive volume of the work of Italian photographer Mario Giacomelli, containing 684 beautiful duotone images grouped into 32 carefully sequenced chapters, with an introduction by Alistair Crawford and an interview with Alessandra Mauro. It exists in two editions: an earlier hardcover (ISBN 9780714841595) and a paperback reprint (ISBN 9780714846040), both published by Phaidon.
Physical specifications: The paperback measures approximately 11 × 9 × 1 inches — a 4to format — with 428 pages and distinctive red paper covers under an illustrated white dust jacket.
Regarding paper: the book seems printed on 150 gsm coated gloss, consistent with Phaidon’s production values for this era — a weight that provides excellent ink hold-out for duotone printing, rendering Giacomelli’s extreme blacks and blown-out whites with the tonal precision his work demands. No official paper specification has been publicly disclosed by Phaidon, but 150 gsm gloss coated is a widely used industry standard for high-end photography books of this size and ambition.
The duotone printing technique — two ink passes, typically black plus a warm gray or second black — is essential to honoring Giacomelli’s originals, which were themselves contact-printed with deep, deliberate tonal manipulation. Some readers have noted that while the images are not facsimiles of the originals, the printing appears well suited to his “brute” graphic style.
Structure: The book is arranged by theme, each chapter a testimony to his highly personal and artistically atmospheric visual style, demonstrating his lifelong preoccupation with landscapes emphasizing linear and abstract patterns, rural townscapes, street scenes, still lifes, and portraits of everyday Italian life. Several chapters include poems that inspired the photographic sequences — a structural choice that mirrors Giacomelli’s own deep literary practice.
Critical reception: World of Interiors called it “a magnificent introduction to one of Europe’s greatest photographic talents,” while Mark Haworth-Booth in the Times Literary Supplement wrote that the monograph “skilfully rehearses one of the most extraordinary, original and engaging careers in photography.”
The Photographer: Mario Giacomelli (1925–2000)
Mario Giacomelli was born on 1 August 1925 in the seaport town of Senigallia in the Marche region of Italy, into a family of modest means. Only nine when his father died, he left high school at thirteen to work as a typesetter, spending his weekends painting and writing poetry.
With money given to him by a resident of the hospice where his mother worked, he opened a printshop — a business that ensured lifelong financial stability. His engagement with photography began shortly thereafter, occurring primarily on Sundays, when the shop was closed. Over the years, the Tipografia Marchigiana at Via Mastai 5 became a pilgrimage destination for artists, critics, scholars, and admirers from around the world.
Photographic formation: After the war, from 1953 onward, he turned to photography and joined the photography group Misa. He wandered the streets and fields of post-war Italy, inspired by the gritty Neo-Realist films of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, and influenced by the photographer Giuseppe Cavalli, developing a style characterized by radical compositions, bold cropping, and stark contrasts.
Technical philosophy: His preference for grainy, high-contrast film and paper produced bold, geometric compositions with glowing whites and deep blacks. He famously described his relationship to the printing process by saying that for him the photographic film was like a printing plate — a lithograph — where images and emotions become stratified. This is not coincidental: his typographer’s eye shaped every darkroom decision.
Key series and their significance:
- Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi (1954–83): Photographs made in the elderly hospice in Senigallia, where his mother worked as a washerwoman — empathetic yet unflinching portraits of old age, titled after a Cesare Pavese poem.
- Scanno (1957–59): In Scanno he produced the image known as Scanno Boy (1957), one of his best-known examples of the emotional effect of his technical innovation — generating a pittura metafisica atmosphere from which dark, out-of-focus figures emerge around a single sharp central subject.
- I Pretini (1961–63): A transcription of the everyday life of young priests in seminaries, later shown at Cologne Photokina in 1963. The series — playful, melancholy, and formally daring — remains among the most celebrated bodies of work in postwar European photography.
- Landscape series: His aerial-perspective landscapes, emphasizing the linear and abstract patterns of plowed Italian fields, recall the mood of the Informal art movement and his close friendship with painter Alberto Burri, whom he met in 1966.
Literary dimension: From the mid-1980s onward, Giacomelli created photographic series explicitly inspired by poetry, drawing on Eugenio Montale, Giacomo Leopardi, Cesare Pavese, Emily Dickinson, and Jorge Luis Borges — borrowing their titles and allowing the texts to shape the emotional arc of his sequences.
International recognition: In 1960 he received a commission from the Catholic Church to document the lives of young priests in seminaries, and in 1978 he was featured in the Venice Biennale. In 1975 Bill Brandt selected him for the major exhibition The Land: 20th Century Landscape Photographs at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. His work entered the permanent collection of MoMA New York, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the V&A, and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
This book as final testament: Giacomelli 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. It is, in that sense, both a monograph and a kind of authorized summation — the photographer’s own view of what his life’s work meant.
A Note on the Author
Alistair Crawford has contributed widely to photography books, catalogues, and journals in Britain, France, Italy, New Zealand, and the United States, and has curated several major touring photographic exhibitions, including Mario Giacomelli, which was shown at PrintWorks Gallery, Chicago, in 1991. His intimacy with the work over decades gives the monograph a scholarly authority rare in photographer surveys of this scale.