One day as it was snowing, we started to make snowballs. So, I charged my camera and my flash, and as they were playing, I photographed them. I did longer apertures and the flash constructed the white. I took pictures of the littles priests as they were bending the “rules” …
Mario Giacomelli
Since 2001, the Berthet-Aittouarès gallery has been presenting the diverse aspects of the profound and singular work of the great Italian photographer Mario Giacomelli.
Today, we are going to show thru 35 old prints, most of them unseen vintages, a new lecture of the seminarian’s cult series made at the beginning of the 60’s after his incursion in the episcopal seminar of Senigallia.
This series was first seen in 1963 at the Photokina of cologne, then in 1967 John Szarkowski will open the doors of the photographic collection of MoMA in New York.
The artist stays in the usual esthetics of his works, made of contrasts between the black cloths and the radiant snow, the image that Giacomelli puts forward is a component of the reality of these young men that isn’t always at the heart of a vocation. We have met one of these seminarians, Gianfranco, whom for the first time in the framework of this exhibition, has revealed to us the genesis of theses famous photographs.
In putting forward for the young priests Io non ho mani che me accarezzino il volto, the first verse of a poem written by Father Davide Maria Turolo, we give the tone, humanist, social and political of these pictures consecrated to young men subtracted from the affection of their family or the love that their age can bring.
Since the opening of the gallery in 1986, Michèle Aittouarès and Odile Aittouarès-Inzerillo have made the same choices as they would for their personal collections and confront paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs or videos.