Vita d'ospizio

Between 1955 and 1957 Mario Giacomelli produced a series of shots entitled Vita d'ospizio (Hospice Life), the first part of a cycle that he considered to be his most important work, to which he would return several times during his lifetime (1966-1968 and 1981-1983):

Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi is the series named after the poem of the same name by Cesare Pavese. Composed during Mario Giacomelli's second photo session in the Senigallia hospice (1966/68), it was also expanded with photos from the previous session ('54/56).

"Of all the things I have done I think this is the most interesting research; in fact, I have felt more emotions being in contact with this environment than in all the other research put together. [...] Why? After having struggled all my life, why does the end of a life have to be this, why does it have to end up in these environments, in these screwed-up institutions?

[...] These photos are more realistic, even in the technique, I chose a different way of printing [contrasting print on extra vigorous paper], there is an essential cut, which you also find in the other images, these are simply more real than the others. More than what I had before my eyes, I wanted to render what I had inside of me, what was born inside as I settled into these things: this fear of growing old, not of dying, this disgust for the price with which a life is paid.

[...] I made sure I was one of them, like them, no longer feeling the camera on them.".
(A. C. Quintavalle, Mario Giacomelli, Feltrinelli, Milan 1980).

"The photos at the hospice are my father's way of penetrating the real, right down to under those exhausted meats bitten by close-up shots and inside those sheets corroded by the flash by the eating whites, in the pain and loneliness of those poor people abandoned to themselves in their last years of life. The closed blacks that look like abysses over which the old women are about to fall, make one feel how great the loneliness is. 
I remember, although I was only a few years old at the time, my grandmother Libera who was a laundress at the hospice in Senigallia, sometimes she would take me with her. I would go with her into an immense, cold, damp room. I remember the water that was on the floor, a lot of it, it was the water leaking from the laundry tubs. There were several washbasins in the room, each woman had her own with a wooden platform so that her feet wouldn't be soaking. In one corner were mountains of sheets soiled with sweat and excrement and the stench mixed with the smell of soap. The washerwomen had no gloves and the water certainly wasn't hot. I remember these sheets being forcibly lifted from the tub and slammed onto the rack to be rubbed, the splashes coming from all sides. Even though I was small, I felt a feeling of pity seeing my grandmother there in front of that 'trocco' (platform), as she called it, and she seemed so small and helpless". (Rita Giacomelli, unpublished notes) 

Giacomelli had seen the same scenes long before, as a child, when his mother Libera took him to work with her, having been widowed at a very young age. He returned to the hospice, some ten years between sessions, for the rest of his life (1955, 1966, 1981). In 1986 his mother died, and perhaps that is why he did not return to photography in the 1990s, but he nevertheless continued with photographs from 1981, two more series E io ti vidi fanciulla and La zia di Franco, as if it were a ritual, to honour his mother or perhaps just to feel her still close.