LONDON.- Rediscovered after 50 years and published here for the very first time, American Voyage is a captivating portrait of 1960s America from Italian photographer Mario Carnicelli.

Featuring over 100 black-and-white and colour images, the collection takes in the people, fashion, colours and textures of sixties American street life, capturing the mood and undercurrent of a changing country.

In 1966, Mario Carnicelli won first place in a national Italian photography competition sponsored by Popular Photography magazine, Mamiya and Pentax. On submitting an image of a demonstration in his hometown of Pistoia, Tuscany, Carnicelli won a scholarship to photograph America. He travelled to the US during the 1960s, and this beautiful book and accompanying exhibition documents his trips across the United States and time spent in cities including Detroit, San Francisco, Buffalo, New York and Chicago.

Approaching the country as an outsider, Carnicelli triumphed in capturing the essence of the American experience. He was fascinated by the country’s multiculturalism, fashion, individuality, freedom and pursuit of happiness uniquely underpinned by a pervasive loneliness and rootlessness he observed in people separated from family and kin.

American Voyage is an optimistic and contemplative look at the complexity of ordinary people and the American dream. From the viewpoint of a European observer, Carnicelli’s pictures offer a fresh and illuminating perspective of American life in the 1960s, surpassing much of the documentary photography of the same subject. The book coincides with an exhibition of Carnicelli’s work at the David Hill Gallery in London.

MARIO CARNICELLI (b.1937) was exposed to photography from a young age, through his family’s photography business in Pistoia, Italy. He went on to document public events, demonstrations and political meetings. His style was in influenced by the humanistic approach, photographers like Lewis Hine and the FSA-photographers. He worked for national newspapers and magazines and had several solo exhibitions of his work during the 1960s and 1970s, before retiring from photography in the 1970s to focus on running his own photography business. Many of his photographs, including his American Voyage essays, have lain forgotten until now.