This great master of Italian photography was born in 1925 into a poor family in Senigallia, a small town on the Adriatic coast, where he spent all his life. Mario Giacomelli began painting as a teenager. Only at the age of thirty did he buy himself a cheap camera. He used it like a painter to create high-contrast, near-abstract landscapes, and brought real gravitas to the subjects of Scanno: the Good Earth, his series on local farmers, and the powerful Death Will Come and Take Your Eyes, taken in a hospice. In strongly Catholic Italy, this highly independent artist had no qualms about creating provocatively poetic series, such as one of priests playing children’s games. All his work is marked by the same concerns and a graphic, painterly treatment conveying the aridity both of the landscape and of the lives of its impoverished inhabitants.The exhibition is a representative selection of the Giacomelli œuvre, part of which is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is staged in the ground floor of the Chapel of Saint-Martin du Méjan, and for the first time features a large number of abstract pieces.

Alessandra Mauro, exhibition curator, in conjunction with Forma, Milan.