It doesn’t snow very often on the Adriatic coast of Italy, perhaps two or three days a year. The rarity of the event helps to explain some of the joy of Mario Giacomelli’s famous pictures of young priests in his home town of Senigallia, enjoying some winter fun in the early 1960s. Scenes like this one were something of a gift for Giacomelli, who loved the possibilities of silhouette, the graphic simplicities of true black and white. The contrast, accentuated by the photographer’s slow shutter speeds and hand printing, gives the pictures their otherworldly dimension, as if the young priests are floating in the air.
The image is a natural fit in a new collection of photographs exploring the idea of “presence”. Its ethereal quality is given substance, grounded by the surprising informality of the young men’s interaction. Giacomelli spent a couple of years winning the trust of the trainee priests, so that he could capture something of the intimacy of their community. His ambition, he said, was to discard “the conventional rules in my treatment of the subject, to reveal the naked man”.
To begin with, Giacomelli called his series “Young Seminarians from the Marche”, but later, when the images were bought by the Getty Museum, he adopted a more poetic title for them: “I Have No Hands That Caress My Face”. The lines came from the anti-fascist theologian Father David Maria Turoldo, who led church resistance to the Nazis during the war. Turoldo’s words were a gesture toward the sometimes lonely sacrifice of a life of Christian service, but Giacomelli’s borrowing gave them another dimension. His images revealed some of the distractions of a life of contemplation. On one occasion he pictured the priests in an impromptu round of Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses; here he watched them unable to resist the devilish temptations of snowballing.
