Photographic Memory and Mystery

A safe bet on the to-do list for friends and family visiting Santa Barbara over the holidays is lavishly laid out at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) this season. SBMA’s current blockbuster exhibition Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse from the Dallas Museum of Art offers cultural enticements for the proverbial entire family, from cosmopolitans to your culture-skeptical uncle Bernie. Impressionism is always a winning ticket, including here and now on State Street.

But don’t neglect the opportunity to head upstairs to the photography and new media art space, where more esoteric pleasures await in the form of Mario Giacomelli: La Gente, La Terra. Curated by the museum’s Andrew Witte, the show itself has bragging rights by artworld standards, as the only place in the country presenting a solo exhibition in this, the Giacomelli’s centennial year, and a display drawn from the museum’s own estimable photography collection.  

This is a show in which wall texts matter, as does a beholder’s slow and patient contemplation. The imagery here doesn’t jump out to grab the eye in any sensationalistic way, and yet bears all the hallmarks of modernist experimentation, rooted in literally earthy subject matter.

Giacomelli (1925-2000) was a self-taught iconoclast in the medium and became internationally known and respected while maintaining his homebase in Senigallia, a small port town in Italy. Innately experimental, by nature and within nature, he worked with various effects and image manipulations in and out of the darkroom and freely deployed unusual cropping and unexpected angles.

A fine place to start in appreciating this show is with perhaps Giacomelli’s most famous piece, “Scanno Boy,” a celebrated stop in the landmark 1964 Museum of Modern Art show, The Photographer’s Eye. That exhibition is often viewed as a trailblazing instigator for the acceptance of fine art photography into the established artworld. The eerie, dream-like image trains its eye on a sharp-focused boy amidst a swirl of unsettled, soft-focus adult figures in stoic procession. Henri-Cartier Bresson had put the small Italian town on the artworld map with his photo series for Harper’s Bazaar, but Giacomelli brought his regional neighbor perspective to his own series of images from the place.

Also from Scanno, the sub-series “Pretini (Young Priests)” is a clear high point in the show — in itself worth the proverbial price of admission. The artist’s careful technique of transforming his dark-clad figures into semi-silhouettes afloat pure white achieves a special poetic pitch in his dance-like priestly pictures. Form, content, invention, and intrigue merge beautifully.

Connection to rural settings and the land itself is a running theme for Giacomelli, as seen in his affectionate series “ La Buona Terra (The Good Earth),” chronicling the lives of wheat farmers and their existential and food cycled rhythms. In his “Awareness of Nature” series of aerial imagery of crops, combined with his altered visuals, leans into the realm of abstraction informed by topography. The “Metamorphosis of the Land” blurs the reality of his shots with double exposures, creating duality and hints of time’s — and terrain’s — passage. 

As he explained of his approach to his photographic visions, “I don’t want it to be immediately identifiable. I would prefer it to recall the folds and furrows of the palm of one’s hands.”

la Personal emotion and memory feed into the unique series “Death Will Come and it Will Have Your Eyes” (its title taken from a poem by Cesare Pavese). The series relates to his youth, experiencing death up close in the hospice facility where his mother worked as a launderess. He depicts this strange, twilight-of-life environment via distorted visuals and wavering focus, with high contrast lighting technique, darkroom tweaks, and even the otherworldly results of expired film.

Even the “straighter” photographs in this selection of his work arrive with subtexts, starting with the frank and empathetic portrait of his weary, lived-in mother’s face. “Figure, no. 271 (the Nude)” shows fragments of nude bodies — the artist and his wife — making a correlation with the forms and lines of the landscape studies in the show. 

And in “People of the South, Puglia, no. 252,” the elegantly composed ensemble of rustic faces calls to mind the neorealist Italian cinema Giacomelli was inspired by, especially Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. 

Giacomelli drew inspiration and influence from sources beyond his chosen medium, including film, poetry, and more. He was plugged into the world of culture and the special impulses of the modernist/experimentalist, while tending to his rural roots. Whether or not that balancing act counts as a paradox is left to the mind of the beholder, but his varied dimensions shine through in this exhibition’s tidy yet broad slice of his unique artistic life.

Mario Giacomelli: La Gente, La Terra is on view at Santa Barbara Museum of Art through February 15. sbma.net