A Tourist's Portrait of American Cities in 1966 - Flashbak

“As a European, you imagined all this enormous wealth, but walking around there was also a lot of poverty”

– Mario Carnicelli

Mario Carnicelli was 29 in 1966 when his won a photography competition sponsored by Popular Photography magazine, Mamiya and Pentax. The prize was a trip from his native Italy to America to take pictures in Chicago, Detroit, Dallas and New York.

Mario’s photographs were not published then nor did they see the light of day during the following decade when he worked as a photojournalist. They weren’t published when he opened a camera shop in Florence. It was only when his shop closed in 2010 and a curator found his pictures among the transparencies and prints in his cellar that Mario’s work became known.

As for what he went to America in search of, Carnicelli said he was drawn to the country’s “multiculturalism, fashion, individuality, freedom and pursuit of happiness uniquely underpinned by a pervasive loneliness and rootlessness”.

American Voyage by Mario Carnicelli by Reel Art Press. This article was originally published in June 2018.