Scanno, made by Mario Giacomelli in 1957 and 1959 in Scanno, Abruzzo, Italy, depicts the town's residents, animals, streets, and pale architecture through an expressive black-and-white language.
Giacomelli rejected a conventional documentary or realist purpose. He said he went to Scanno with a "desire to participate," bringing his own memories and earlier work to the reality before him. Rather than describe social conditions or seek images of southern Italian poverty, he wanted to "dream" and suppress details that made the pictures read as reportage. This stance shaped one of his early photographic series, made while black clothing still created pronounced contrasts with the town's white streets and walls.
Across the series, dark cloaks, hats, cattle, and chickens punctuate sunlit lanes and pale facades. Figures gather in streets and doorways, yet their spacing and softened detail can make them appear separate from one another. Shallow depth of field leaves passages of the frame indistinct against the whitewashed streets.
Giacomelli made almost all the exposures at about 1/25 second, deliberately allowing motion blur. Most prints are gelatin silver, and Giacomelli whitened backgrounds, deepened figures, and kept intermediate grays as empty areas that balanced the composition. A circa-1980 proof carrying his instruction to add white at the left shows that he continued adjusting the tonal structure of a 1957 image decades after exposure.
Recognition began in 1958, when Scanno, exhibited with two other series, contributed to Giacomelli's first-overall prize in Osimo. It received a first prize in Rome in 1960 and an Honor Award at the Yolo International Exhibition in 1964. That year John Szarkowski included a photograph in MoMA's The Photographer's Eye, then published the boy image in Looking at Photographs in 1973. The series appeared in retrospectives in Rome in 1980 and at Castello di Rivoli in 1992.
