SANTA BARBARA — Now open at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) is an exhibition of notable Italian photographer Mario Giacomelli (1925–2000). Through innovative darkroom techniques, he depicted the people and landscapes of Italy’s Marche region with high contrast and sharp psychological intensity. Celebrating a significant new gift to the museum as well as the hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth, Mario Giacomelli: La Gente, La Terra features 36 photographs taken between 1955 and 1980—all from SBMA’s collection—including some of his most iconic images. The exhibition will be open until February 15, 2026.
The exhibition is a part of Giacomelli 100, an international commemoration of the artist’s centennial organized by The Mario Giacomelli Archive. SBMA is currently the only US venuehosting a solo exhibition of the artist for his centennial year, joining a roster including retrospectives at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome, Italy) and the Palazzo Reale (Milan, Italy).
Photography was a lifelong experiment for self-taught Giacomelli, who came from a family of peasant origin and dropped out of school at age 13. He first apprenticed in typesetting, then briefly served in the Italian army during WWII. In 1950, Giacomelli established a print shop in his hometown of Senigallia. He bought his first camera, a simple Bencini Comet, three years later and began teaching himself the ins and outs of the darkroom. Although he remained in Senigallia until his death, he achieved international acclaim.
This exhibition presents two important portfolios Giacomelli produced in 1981 in collaboration with The Bristol Workshops in Photography (located in Bristol, Rhode Island): La Gente (The People) and Paesaggio (Landscape). Each portfolio includes 18 photographs hand-selected by the artist.
“Bringing La Gente and Paesaggio back together in the collection is like reuniting two siblings,” observes Andrew Witte, exhibition curator and SBMA Curatorial Assistant of Photography and New Media. “Together, the two portfolios tell the story of the first three decades of Giacomelli’s career and show how his techniques developed over time.”
Notable highlights of the exhibition include Giacomelli’s series Pretini (Young Priests), photographs the artist captured over three years working closely with the seminary in his hometown. The lighthearted images of the seminarians dancing in the snow are now some of his most famous. Much more than transcriptions of reality, however, Giacomelli employed several experimental darkroom techniques to create strange, often disorienting perspectives.
For the silhouetted Pretini, he perfected a masking technique that makes the figures appear to be suspended on a white backdrop.
His landscape photographs, famously taken from the tops of hills, were often developed at angles to make them appear perfectly flat, emphasizing the geometric patterns of crops and fields. Others are double exposures—two images developed on the same print—which result in impossible perspectives, as if the land were folding onto itself. Giacomelli was a staunch environmentalist, and he saw this manipulation as parallel to the harmful rise of industrialized agriculture during the years of il miracolo economico italiano (the Italian economic miracle,
1958–63) following WWII.
The label texts in the exhibition dive deeper into Giacomelli’s web of influences in Italian film, poetry, and contemporary art. One of Giacomelli’s important early inspirations was Italian Neorealist film, a genre defined by movies such as Bicycle Thieves (1948, dir. Vittorio De Sica).
He was also close friends with Italian contemporaries such as Alberto Burri (1915–1995), whose mixed-material abstract paintings had a clear impact on Giacomelli’s sense of composition. 2La Gente was gifted to the museum in 1983 by Yolanda and Arthur Steinman, notable collectors whose donation of over 500 objects to SBMA helped form the base of the photography collection. The recent gift of Giacomelli’s portfolio Paesaggio from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin in memory of Marjorie and Leonard Vernon was a welcome addition to the collection of 20th-century photography. SBMA has nearly 10,000 photographs in its permanent collection, including examples of over 80 photographic processes. These in-depth holdings extensively represent the birth and early steps of the medium as well as contemporary artists that are pushing the format to new limits.
Mario Giacomelli: La Gente, La Terra is curated by Andrew Witte, SBMA Curatorial Assistant of Photography and New Media.