Self-portraits contain the wreckage of memories. In these images, Giacomelli is so caught up in the act of playing that he forgets to be a photographer. Having spent his life creating photographs that act as substitutes for his interiority, from 1995 Giacomelli entered the space of the photographs himself, using a timed shutter release.
This series of self-portraits offers a kind of “backstage” view onto Giacomelli’s late works. The series was not intended to be self-reverential. Instead, it feeds off Giacomelli’s indefatigable desire to embed himself physically in the imaginative realm that the camera renders visible. Giacomelli cannot remain an outsider and so throws himself in to become ‘one amongst others”; the puppets, fake animals, his “poetic companions’. The photographer is no longer a spectator or chronicler of external events, but an actor, a co-protagonist. He situates himself on the horizon across which knowledge opens onto reality. Giacomelli takes Cavalli’s teaching to the extreme: a photograph must tell a story, and a story cannot but be subjective.
