Interview with Giancolombo            

Conclusions

The Agency after the '60 undergoes a change and becomes mainly a historical archive. "Many fellow workers went away leading their way. Magazines hired their own photographers. And television was a dangerous contender to publishing industry. Finally, operating costs had grown high” explains Giancolombo.

He’s not the only one who has to deal with the changed publishing, economic and social trend. Only the great international agencies can keep up. Many titles, the American and mythical Life among all, are forced to close, lacking of readers and advertisers.

And there’s something else: Giancolombo has a family by now, which he must pay attention and time to. But he doesn’t stop shooting. He continues producing photo reports so as to be compared to Magnum photographers, and, in step with the times, fashion and advertising shootings. He keeps on training photographers, setting up a school that will be active up till the eighties.

Giancolombo takes part in photography at institutional level, as well, setting with colleagues and friends the first Photojournalists Association, in 1964, whereof has been president for ten years. He will resign in occasion of the honorary registration to the Journalists Association, in 1974. In 1984 Giancolombo is called to exhibit at the Senate in Rome a gallery of portraits of the main personalities of the Italian post-war newspaper journalism.

Today Giancolombo is eighty-two. “I stop shooting only after a car crash, a couple of years ago” he tells. Surely he didn’t stop having all the drive and the energy that made him famous. Nor he quitted the story of the Italian photojournalism that owes him so much.