I’ve decided to talk about the italian photographer Mario Giacomelli two days ago, when I stumbled in a picture that I’ve shot last winter with my iPhone. It was the page of a book and I started to read it again, not remembering at all what book could have been from. When I was done with it, I knew immediately that the book was about Mario Giacomelli because of the simplicity of the words, which also makes the beauty of his person. The book is called “My whole life”, and it’s actually a collection of chat on photography and on its own life.
Mario Giacomelli was a great photographer, one of my favorite, and I believe a unique one in the whole world because the way he did it is so different from everybody else. I’ll talk more about him and his pictures in a future post, right now I want to talk about the page I found, because I really believe the same things about photography (and life too). Here it is:
Yes I know it’s in italian, and yes I know it’s a bad picture! But It was a reminder, and I’ll translate it for you. Here it goes (something like this):
“I’m sure that I will stop (to photograph), I will die, and I won’t have understood anything about photography, because I can’t figure it out. Not in its being an image, I can’t figure it out as a language, because the only thing that matter to me is to have that desire. It happens on sunday, the only day where I shoot: I wake up, I know that I go out to get a cappuccino – I just do it on Sundays -, I wear sunday clothes. I’m like farmers, it’s important to me (to have these rituals). If sunday is a day just on the calendar, It’s not sunday anymore, it’s a day like the others! But if you live it like I do, (as a ritual) – I shave, I always have the same pasta out at the restaurant, the same cappuccino – myself, that always hate repetitions but end up in doing them all – it’s not a repetitions anymore! This is something that goes on and on, there is not repetitions in doing the same things if you make them live.
Then I get on the car, I start the engine and I go wherever the car wants: I feel that it wants to go left, then right… I don’t understand where it wants to go: I don’t know where I’m going because it doesn’t exist a place in the world where you can say: “if you go there you will take pictures”. I am a person that needs to find, and to find you can’t sleep, you have to move! So wherever direction I feel that the car wants to go, I let it go, and I walk with it.”
Right now I just would like to have the book with me because I would like to go on and read to know what he would have said next… But anyway, I just wanted to share this page because I feel I intend photography like him. Something not completing rational, an evolving process. A process that makes you grow, and reflect on the world you see.
That’s it for now. As I said I’ll talk more about his most beautiful pictures in a future post. If you are curious and you can’t wait, goggle him!
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I like photograph where there’s a big sense of composition, order, geometry. I like it when it is very graphic and ordered. This is why I’ve always wanted to shoot houses from above. We all think that our house is special. It’s big, small, it’s “bigger than”, it’s “nicer”. It’s ours… From above they are just boxes. Big, small, red green or blue. They are just the same. 
