For this series, Giacomelli took his inspiration from ‘Caroline Branson‘, a poem in Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Giacomelli envisages a world of passion so powerful it transforms and destructs everything in its path. Two lovers, consumed by desire, are immersed in nature and lose themselves in it. The series stemmed from Luigi Crocenzi’s 1967 screenplay for a photo-story project intended for television. The programme never aired because Giacomelli refused to translate the poem literally.
But the photographs that Giacomelli had taken remained, and he revised them freely between 1971 and 1973, transforming them with superimpositions and using them to channel his own emotions. In 1986, Giacomelli superimposed select details from the Spoon River series over photographs of the female subject in Passato. In both series, the two protagonists have (by means of superimposition) dark, flowing hair, which is in fact that of Giaomelli’s daughter, Rita, photographed in the early 60s. Caroline Branson is rich with autobiographical references; it is an intimate play of reflections. In the 90s, Giacomelli added autobiographical elements (self-portraits, his garden, etc.).
‘When I photographed the sunflowers they had dried out. I looked at them and thought: with the light behind them, these circles cast in shadow look like faces and these lingering petals are like my hair, it was as if I was looking at a mass of self-portraits.’
(M Giacomelli in S Guerra, Mario Giacomelli. La mia vita intera, Bruno Mondadori, 2008).
