For the series Caroline Branson, Mario Giacomelli drew inspiration from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Inspired by the poem, he envisioned a world of overwhelming passion, where two lovers are consumed by desire, merging with and losing themselves in nature. The series originated from Luigi Crocenzi’s 1967 screenplay for a television photo-story project, but the program was never broadcast as Giacomelli refused to translate the poem literally.

Giacomelli later revisited the photographs, freely reworking them between 1971 and 1973 with superimpositions to express his own emotions. In 1986, he merged details from Caroline Branson with images of the female subject in Passato. Both series feature dark, flowing hair, drawn from photographs of his daughter, Rita, taken in the early 1960s. The series is rich with autobiographical elements, forming an intimate interplay of reflections. In the 1990s, Giacomelli further enriched the work with self-portraits and images of his garden.

“When I photographed the sunflowers, they had dried out. With light behind them, their shadowed circles looked like faces, and the lingering petals reminded me of my hair. It felt as though I was looking at a mass of self-portraits,” Giacomelli reflected.

(Adapted from Katiuscia Biondi’s text)