The series Per poesie (For poems) envisages a body of work in continual evolution, nourished over time by fragments of reality. It is a sort of reserve of images “left to decant”, awaiting their future incorporation in a new story, or to expand a previous one. Per poesie immerses us in the vision of an artist who never believed in dividing his oeuvre into neat, rigid categories. Instead, Giacomelli saw photography as a continual flux that could reveal itself in this or that series, but always in relation to a unity. Essentially, Giacomelli took the same photograph in thousands of variations: it is a photograph that deletes the distance between past and present, and pursues that which is fleeting, unveiling invisibility and voicing the unutterable.
This series is almost entirely unpublished. In 2006, Giacomelli’s friend, the artist Enzo Cucchi, selected hundreds of photographs from this series for the book/exhibition Mario Giacomelli. Cose mai viste, Photology, Milan. In the publication, he didn’t include any form of text or explanation in order to foreground Giacomelli’s creative flux which saw every image joined to the next in a single extended story. It is like an entire life glimpsed in a flash, with all its memories, moments, visions, fears, and desires. It is like dreaming with your eyes open, when words are not required for everything to find a sense of order.
