Silver salt gelatin print
cm 30.5×40.4
1962
NOTES:
Signed in pen on the back.
PUBLICATIONS:
G. G. Negri, Storie di terra. Mario Giacomelli, Milan, 1992, ill. p. 99.
EXHIBITIONS:
2016, Milan, Mario Giacomelli e la terra veniva come magica, Studio Guastalla Arte Moderna e Contemporanea.
Magical earth
For me, it doesn’t matter the country, the place that is represented, but the emotion, the contact that exists, that is created between me and the earth. So it is the earth that is important rather than the landscape itself. Of course, these feelings arise from the landscape, from its construction, from the whites and blacks that I see in it. But they also arise because I know the people who work the land, and I know the contact that is created between the earth and the farmer.
In Giacomelli’s photos of the earth, particularly in the series Presa di coscienza sulla natura (Awareness of Nature), such as this one presented by Studio Guastalla, the protagonists are the marks left by man, the furrows that the farmer traces on the earth—and which the artist himself often asks him to trace according to his mental design—the imprints that are like wrinkles, like wounds. They make the earth seem magical. This is why the earth is seen as the wrinkles on the hand of the farmer, of the worker: the earth is the marks of the farmer. It is not easy to explain what I feel, in fact I would never want to. The earth always has cracks, openings. It is like the side of Christ, the earth has the same cut, the same wound.
Through the marks traced on the earth, one perceives the changing landscape, the incessant passing of time, the changes. It is the artist’s anguish, his tragic sense that emerges in violent contrasts, in which the grays disappear while the dazzling white erases everything that is not needed and the black is a hole where problems fall into a void that I continue to photograph.