Mario Giacomelli

Only nine when his father died, at 13, the boy left high school to work as a typesetter and spent his weekends painting and writing poetry.

[3] He wandered the streets and fields of post-war Italy, inspired by the gritty Neo-Realist films of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini,[4] and influenced by the renowned Italian photographer Giuseppe Cavalli, founder of Misa, and developing a style characterized by radical compositions, bold cropping and stark contrasts.

His images are high-contrast, quite unlike the modulated full tonal range of his mentor Cavalli, and are the result of using electronic flash, from overdevelopment of his film and compensatory heavy printing[4] so that nearly-black forms 'float' against a white ground.

[7] In accounting for these choices he referred to his printing-industry and graphic arts training; "For me the photographic film is like a printing plate, a lithograph, where images and emotions become stratified.

Giacomelli was inspired by the literature[8] of Cesare Pavese, Giacomo Leopardi (a native of Giacomelli's region), and the postwar existentialist Eugenio Montale, giants of Italian writing[3] from which he often borrowed titles for his picture series, such as the confronting, unsentimental pictures he made (1955–57) in an old-people's home, where his mother worked as a washer-woman; Verrà la more e avrà i tuoi occhi ('Death will come and will have your eyes'), taken from a Pavese poem.

In 2013 the boy was revealed by Simona Guerra, researcher and niece of Mario Giacomelli,[13] to be Claudio De Cola, and on October 19, 1957, he was exiting the Church of Sant'Antonio da Padova like the people around him, after the Mass.