Lugano
Mario Giacomelli was born in 1925 in Senigallia (Marche, Italy), where he lived all his life. His father died when he was nine years old; his mother worked at Senigallia’s elderly home and the young Mario often accompanied her there. As a young man, he worked as a typographer, painting on weekends and writing poetry. Inspired by the wartime movies of filmmakers like Fellini, Giacomelli taught himself photography and he developed his art in the generally impoverished countryside. At that time, the Italian photographer Giuseppe Cavalli had moved to Senigallia and he was eager to form a club that would promote photography as art. In 1953, the Misa Club was formed, with its members including Cavalli as president and Giacomelli as treasurer. Among his most memorable images is one known as The Scanno Boy. It was part of the 1957-59 series of pictures that were taken in Scanno, an impoverished town in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. It shows a young boy framed by elderly women wearing black. John Szarkowski, former director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, has described the image as ”the halo of the worn footpath”. The Scanno serie has been acquired by Szarkowski for the MoMA in 1964. Giacomelli died in Senigallia in 2000, while working on the series Questo lo vorrei raccontare; Ricordi di un ragazzo del ’25 and Le Domeniche Prima.