‘The landscapes are fantastic and raw, with much of their intensity derived from the way they recall ancient woodcuts or Oriental prints. Snow, crops and hills are reduced to graphic markings, to pure intimation. It is as if the totality of each image emerges from the mind and the nib of the etching tool, rather than from the camera’s lens and its light sensitive plate.’
(extract from a review in “Citta di Milano” of a solo exhibition of Giacomelli’s work at the Milan Public Library in 1960)
Giacomelli: ‘Usually the landscape is already constructed and I choose which composition best suits what I’m looking for. If I don’t find the landscape I’m after, I create it myself, I intervene, and I’ve been doing this since 1955 […]. I feel man’s presence more in nature than in his conventional context. Nature isn’t just composition and matter, it’s the substance of man’s life; it bears his suffering, his wrinkles, the calluses on the hands of the farmer who entrusts his hopes to the land. Another important thing is observing nature over time. Across the arc of the seasons, nature stands and sings victorious in front of man, always able to return to life and to inspire hope in others, and this is something I don’t find in man, something of which he is incapable.’
[…]
Quintavalle: ‘Beyond your composition choice, do you often intervene directly by altering the landscape?’
Giacomelli: ‘Whenever I really want to bring home a landscape, I don’t manage to find the one I want. I’ve been following the same landscapes for years now, but I’ve restrained from photographing some because they didn’t offer the right composition or colours and so didn’t correspond to what I’m looking for, they lacked something in one way or another. And so I used the blacks and whites to get the composition that wasn’t like it was in nature but how I wanted it […], to give it new life, to let it have the upper hand on nature for once. There are images that I don’t photograph because they’re poorly composed, but these landscapes always win me over, and the moment when I see myself in the images, when I find my own graphic expression, I try to make the landscape my own.’
Quintavalle: ‘What difference do you see between your photographs from the 50s, through to the 60s and 70s?’
Giacomelli: ‘Rather than a difference that you can grasp from the images, it’s a difference that has grown within me, that has pushed me, in an unplanned way, to seek out new signs, new compositions.’
