I’m not a photographer, I don’t know how to be one

This book is the result of a collaboration between Claude Nori, from Contrejour Éditions, and Katiuscia Biondi, from the Mario Giacomelli Archive. They met in 2015 and began a book project which seeks to make Giacomelli’s presence feel tangible, to revive his creativity, and breathe new life into his vital images.

They achieve this by using full-page spreads, and by doing away with captions. The result is a continuous flux of images: one flows into the next without a chronological order, instead tracing the current of Giacomelli’s stream of creative consciousness, building connections between signs and symbols.

Giacomelli’s oeuvre is not made up of insular images. His photographs are all linked and this interconnection builds a discourse. His oeuvre has its own internal grammar: rhymes, assonances, rhetorical figures, alliteration, oxymorons. Giacomelli expresses himself synesthetically. He borrows pieces of reality, overturns them, dresses them with new meaning, digests them, and then finally regurgitates them into the outside realm in the form of photography.

Giacomelli’s photographs are living organisms requiring constant care. Giacomelli constantly turned his photographs on themselves, linking them together through patterns of echo and repetition. Everything becomes symbolic in this eternal cycle of return. Giacomelli printed his photographs and then distilled them down to their essentiality, allowing their symbolism to echo across his practice: he reproduced, superimposed, cropped, overexposed, scrutinized, distorted, and remade them. He pushed photography beyond the bounds of reality. He wanted to get ‘under the skin of reality,’ as he described it.

Art and life fuse. It is in this continuity that we have the greatest hope of finding ourselves.

  • Hardcover: 110 pages
    Publisher: Contrejour Éditions, Biarritz / Nuvole Rosse Edizioni, Milan (first edition April 2016)
    Language: Italian / French / English
    Text by Katiuscia Biondi Giacomelli