Verrà la morte e avrà I tuoi occhi

From the Getty Museum record

The first body of work that Giacomelli exhibited as a series was Hospice. It depicts residents of the home for the elderly in Senigallia where his mother was a laundress and which he visited for several years before he began photographing there. Made with flash, the resulting images are characterized by their unflinching scrutiny of individuals living out their last days. He later referred to these as his truest and most direct photographs because they reflected his own fear of growing old. Giacomelli continued this series for almost three decades, renaming it Death Will Come and It Will Have Your Eyes in 1966 after the first few lines of a poem by the writer Cesare Pavese (Italian, 1908–1950). For a portfolio published in 1981 he heightened the unsettling qualities of mental and physical decline and isolation by tightly cropping his negatives and printing on paper that was curled rather than flat. > Death will come and will have your eyes—this death that accompanies usfrom morning till evening, unsleeping.—Cesare Pavese, translated by Geoffrey Brock, 2002 See other examples of works from this series ([2016.179.6.10](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/297444/), [2016.179.6.11](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/297445/), [2016.179.6.12](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/297446/), [2016.179.40](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/297490/)) Virginia Heckert, J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photographs 2021