From the Archive
The World According to Guido Guidi
The Italian photographer and Renaissance man channels his training as an architect, painter, and draughtsman into quiet studies of European towns and landscapes.
This interview originally appeared in Aperture, Fall 2015, “The Interview Issue.”
“I was interested in everything: the portrait of a person, of a house, of a wall . . . . Nothing was unimportant; everything was worthy of attention,” Guido Guidi says in these pages. Guidi was born in 1941, near Cesena, in Northern Italy, and since the 1960s has recorded quiet scenes in the Italian countryside and other parts of Europe, rendering rural towns, marginal landscapes, and lone figures in his signature soft palette. “All photographers love his work,” Martin Parr says, “but it remains so under the radar and underrated, it hurts.”
Guidi trained as an architect, painter, and draughtsman—and an abiding interest in perspective and modest architectural forms underpins his photographs. His influences range from Renaissance painting to the American photographers Walker Evans, Stephen Shore, and Robert Adams, whose work investigates place and vernacular architecture with cool detachment. Guidi, too, shares their interest in the “social landscape,” and throughout the 1980s and ’90s, he used a large-format camera to look at changes afoot in Italy as a result of industrialization or migration. In counterpoint to his photographs of the individual’s relationship to the world are these larger explorations, including his photographs of Porto Marghera, the industrial area next to Venice; Gibellina, Sicily, hit by an earthquake in 1968; as well as urban peripheries.
Guidi still lives in Cesena, where he continues to photograph; he teaches at universities in Venice and Ravenna. His books include A New Map of Italy (2011) and Veramente (2014), which have helped bring his work to a larger audience. For this issue, Guidi spoke with Antonello Frongia, a historian of photography—in person in Rubiera, near Reggio Emilia, and also by phone—about his influences, his contemporaries (including Luigi Ghirri), and on how, in his view, “the spirit lies in simplicity, not in rhetoric.”
Antonello Frongia: When did you start taking photographs?
Guido Guidi: I was sixteen, in my third year of high school. I was only familiar with my family’s photo-album and my uncle’s amateur photographs—he was the one who made the album. What I was looking at was vernacular, not refined photography. When I began taking photographs, I was using a 6-by-6-format camera, but I followed my uncle’s example: I photographed my friends, although I was using a small tripod I had bought.
Frongia: And so was it in Venice that you began to be seriously involved with photography?
Guidi: In Venice I studied architecture, but it was a bit later, at the Corso Superiore di Disegno Industriale (an industrial design program) that I began to photograph with a certain awareness. I had been fascinated by perspective since the age of thirteen, when I enrolled in art school, so much so that during my first year I asked my older schoolmates to teach me the rudiments of perspective drawing. Modern painting completely abandoned perspective; as the art historian Daniel Arasse says, the white square on a white background destroyed perspective. Photography continues to be based on perspective, even if it may continually betray it.
Frongia: What do you mean by “betray”?
Guidi: In photography, as in Renaissance painting, perspectival deception is always part of the game. Perspective shows depth but also the negation of depth, namely the surface. Let’s call it a perspectival game, when a photograph or a painting reveals the plot of its own structure, the means by which it is made. Perspective describes how the world is made. During the Renaissance, Alberti spoke simply of commensuratio, measuring things; perspective as symbolic form emerges later. Perspective was invented to measure the concrete world, the public square, the res publica. From a political standpoint, this new idea revolutionized the then-Gothic world. Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence wanted to show that his policies were democratic, without deception, res publica. He wanted to show the things that took place in public squares, not in private rooms. Arasse says that after Palla Strozzi brought Gentile da Fabriano to Florence to paint a fairy-tale world suitable for a Gothic prince, Cosimo de’ Medici called in Filippo Lippi, who, along with Masaccio, Donatello, and Brunelleschi, began a new visual discourse based on the measuring of the world, on perspective.
Frongia: Which photographers did you know during your studies?
Guidi: At the Corso Superiore di Disegno Industriale, Italo Zannier showed Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Images à la sauvette (The Decisive Moment, 1952) and Paul Strand and Cesare Zavattini’s Un paese (1955). All Italian photography in the vein of neorealism was influenced by Strand, while more amateur photographers were looking at Cartier-Bresson. In 1967 I saw a Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, a large show with photographs of all sizes, some as large as bedsheets. The exhibition left me perplexed—the exotic places, the virtuosity—but I remember that I lingered over one of Indian women who were “raising up” the clouds [the photograph, Srinagar, Kashmir (1948) shows Muslim women praying at sunrise in the Himalayas]. When I began working seriously, I did some frontal portraits influenced by Strand. Actually, the first photographer I discovered on my own was Bill Brandt—the social Brandt, the one of the London catacomb metros, not the one who did nudes. But I was also interested in the aggressive photography of William Klein, with his harsh glance at people and the world, a very critical glance, very unflattering toward the subject. Many of my photographs from those years were polemical; they were about doing the opposite of the norm, like Klein and [Robert] Frank.
Frongia: Is the sequence of photographs of the man reading a newspaper from this period?
Guidi: It must have been around 1967 or 1968. I shot it in the waiting room of the station in Cesena, when I was traveling to Venice, where I was studying. I shot what was in front of me without aiming at the person, but to the side, so I wouldn’t be noticed. Then I printed only the left part of the negative. I wanted to create a sequence; I wasn’t interested in capturing a particular moment, even if the sequence is then made up of distinct moments. The photographs are presented in the order in which they were taken, as the camera recorded them.
So, we spoke before about perspective; for Brunelleschi, who also built mechanical clocks, measuring the world also meant measuring time. Perhaps unknowingly, I think through the sequence I rediscovered this idea of perspective as an articulation of time, the opposite of the “decisive moment.” Maybe I was also influenced by the Conceptual art of this period, which I was following carefully.
Frongia: What relationship did you have with the art world when you began? How did Conceptual art influence you?
Guidi: These were years when Conceptual art was becoming established and clearly I kept up with what was happening, but I have never liked labels. For example, in my work it was considered Conceptual that I was writing beneath the photos, or showing two paired photos instead of only one. In fact I would do this in order to show the nature of process in my work. The root of these practices, which came to be called Conceptual, can be found in the Bauhaus: one of my teachers at the Corso Superiore di Disegno Industriale was Luigi Veronesi, who had brought a modernist, scientific attitude directly from the Bauhaus.
But I believe that all art has always been anachronistically Conceptual. And much neo-Conceptual work being done today bores me: it is sterile and academic. Conceptual art is often antithetical to looking, just as Duchamp was opposed to “retinal” art. But this phony distinction between the retina, which records, and the brain, which reasons, has been contradicted by neuroscience. Seeing pertains to the retina, and the retina pertains to the brain; it has the function of restoring already codified images to the brain; it already has the task of producing a thought.
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Frongia: Were you influenced by painting? You studied in an art school as a teenager.
Guidi: Art informel taught me the notion of rapid execution. Informel painting is resolved in a moment. Jackson Pollock’s gesture is also quick. It is a modality that goes back to East Asia, to the idea of the haiku, for example. Informel is closer to photography than one thinks, precisely because of the rapid action. In both, there is the pleasure of the material, but there is also a refusal to take time to think about things. You do it and it catches you by surprise, because you don’t know what you are doing until after it is done. For me, execution is important; if there is a reasoning process, it is amalgamated, mixed in with the material.
The further away one moves from the center, the less power one senses. I seemed to have more freedom working at the margins.
Frongia: Were you interested in the “social landscape” around you at some point?
Guidi: Really I was interested in everything: the portrait of a person, of a house, of a wall—it was all a pretext for experimenting. Nothing was unimportant; everything was worthy of attention. Certainly I was interested in the social landscape, in the 1960s and later. But the series of the man with the newspaper was also a sort of provocation; I anticipated some sort of reaction from him.
I understood that photography, in addition to being a piece of paper, could be understood as a performance, a social action in space and in time that can provoke a reaction on the part of the subject.
Frongia: Lee Friedlander’s work has been important to you. Do you remember how you came to know his work?
Guidi: I remember that I had seen Friedlander’s name in Ugo Mulas’s photobook New York: The New Art Scene (1967). And one of Mulas’s Verification photographs, the one featuring the mirror, was dedicated to Friedlander. As soon as Friedlander’s Self Portrait came out in 1970, I bought it, but it was only on the occasion of the lone photography biennial, Venice ’79, that I was able to meet him. That was when I heard him talk about the vernacular. He said he wasn’t interested in art photography, but in the vernacular photograph, in the snapshot. I could relate to this, of course, since I had grown up with the family photographs shot by my uncle, who had them printed at the photography store before gluing them into an album.
Frongia: Did you photograph people as emblems of society?
Guidi: Even when I was just getting started, and I was photographing people, I was interested in men and women, period. Social types, such as those by August Sander, interested me less. There is a difference between the social landscape of Sander and that of American photographers like Lee Friedlander, but also Walker Evans and Paul Strand. In Evans’s work, people usually have great dignity. In Strand’s photographs, whether it’s a farmer or a mayor, they are heroes. It is no accident that Strand loved Piero della Francesca; the figures in Piero’s painting are regal. I have never photographed heroes; my focus was always on people, not on types. I didn’t want to make categories or taxonomies.
Even when I was making series, like the one on houses in the early 1970s, I didn’t limit myself to photographing only that type of subject. Houses alternate with people, curbstones, trees. Once again, it seems to me that photographing only one type of subject requires a project done at your desk; I direct my gaze only toward those things I consider an emblem of something else. At a certain moment I felt pushed to leave my room, like in Wim Wenders’s The Wrong Move (1975), when Wilhelm breaks the windowpane with the palm of his hand and leaves the house. I leave the house and what do I find? A house, an entrance door, a woman who passes by or who asks me something.
Frongia: I recall that back in the 1980s you suggested reading Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery (1948).
Guidi: I also had a little book on Zen and the camera [Robert Leverant, Zen in the Art of Photography (1969)]. But even earlier, there was Minor White, although I think I am more secular than White. Let’s say that as a Mediterranean person I don’t insist on the “spirit,” or on the symbolism of clouds, as Stieglitz does, although I appreciate them a lot, as I also appreciate Strand’s clouds, laden with rain and prehistory and also spirituality. However, all this is excessively rhetorical.
I too am spiritual, but I wouldn’t want to be rhetorical. The spirit lies in simplicity, not in rhetoric.
Frongia: In the early 1970s you systematically photographed buildings, houses, small precarious constructions on the Romagna coast.
Guidi: That series was another way to confront leaving the ghetto of the unique photograph, the photograph-painting. The title of that work was Facciata (Façade); I went back to the dictionary definition, which in Italian refers both to the front of a building and the “face” of a sheet of paper. The subject of the series, however, came from Walker Evans. Early on, in 1971, I had the catalog for the retrospective John Szarkowski curated at MoMA, which, for a long time, was my point of reference for understanding Evans’s photography. I immediately liked his Victorian houses and above all those vernacular ones found in Alabama or in Ossining, New York.
Frongia: Was there a moment when you devoted yourself to a more “classical” vision?
Guidi: At some point I saw a sort of normalization of Klein’s and Frank’s rule-breaking attitudes, so my reaction was to go back to old work, to our great-grandfathers. My only radical passage was when I returned to old ways, using anachronistic tools like the 8-by-10-format camera. I was doing too many photographs; I was trigger-happy and producing a lot of unsatisfactory negatives. The photographic grain always bothered me, and, in fact, my first camera, when I was sixteen, was already 2 ¼ by 2 ¼ inches, which was an anachronism for that time. Around 1976 I managed to get a 5-by-7 inch, and from then on I began working with a scarcity of means, in black and white, and a bit later in color as well, initially with low-quality lenses and with disappointing results. Studying the work of American photographers such as Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, and William Christenberry, I built myself an 8-by-10 out of plywood, although until 1985 I continued to use insufficient lenses. It was clearly a return to Evans, to Weston, too, but above all to the old photographers from the nineteenth century, from Timothy O’Sullivan to Atget. Using a large-format camera was also a polemic with my friend Luigi Ghirri, who said, “What good is such sharp sight when we are in a dead end?”
Frongia: What did Ghirri mean?
Guidi: I believe that Luigi, citing Shakespeare, was thinking about the general situation; everything becomes topsy-turvy; life, time, everything goes to rack and ruin. It was like saying: “I was ship- wrecked, and what good is it to collect stones or pay attention to blades of grass?” The psychologist Ruggero Pierantoni says that there are two ways of reacting when one is shipwrecked: there are those who start screaming in desperation, and those, instead, who gather up the remaining fragments of wood to build a raft. You need keen eyesight for looking carefully at all the details around. I think that Luigi recognized the shipwreck and that he took shelter in classical order, in a central view. But there was one thing we had in common: an interest in art, especially in old painting. I was more interested in the early Renaissance; Luigi, especially later, was interested in Bernardo Bellotto, in Caspar David Friedrich, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Frongia: In this view of a poplar grove on the Via Romea you seem to respond to certain elements that characterize Ghirri’s later work: perspective, the Italian countryside, the snow . . .
Guidi: It is a photograph in the neoclassical tradition, with a central vanishing point at the back. Of the photographers of my generation, Luigi Ghirri was also very interested in perspective, and he was very precise about locating the vanishing point in a central position. It seems to me that for Ghirri this idea is connected to the desire to represent infinity, which is a romantic idea. My attempt, instead, has always been to escape from the idea of romantic infinity, to return to physical reality. In this photograph the vanishing point is central, but this barrier I put in the foreground is symptomatic: the earth and the snow are the archaic, primitive site, the place of childhood, of the defenseless eye, nonliterary.
Frongia: Your discourse on perspective as a description of the res publica might seem to lead to the Italian piazza, but unlike photographers of your generation such as Ghirri, Mimmo Jodice, and Olivo Barbieri, you spent little time in historical cities, paying more attention instead to uncertain places with little structure. Why?
Guidi: Because I am interested in interstices. The res publica is also and above all outside the center. In medieval tradition, as Pierantoni points out, the Madonna is positioned at the center of the painting, Saint Joseph stands next to her, further to the side are minor saints, and even further away are the little angels who fly about. The further away one moves from the center, the less power one senses. I seemed to have more freedom working at the margins, like the little angels. The very fact of working with photography, instead of with the “fine arts,” has given me the possibility of working in a free zone, with less embarrassment and more confidence, in an area where the academy and the art system have less power.
Frongia: In Italy, your attention to the marginal has often been commented on as a denunciation of disorder, of the destruction of the landscape. Do you share this interpretation?
Guidi: I have never felt I was so denunciatory. Certainly at the beginning, around 1968, nothing was going well. My friends were all protesters and I, too, participated in this social rage. But in my work there is not so much denunciation as a growing awareness, an attempt to touch things, to relate to the world, to understand it even in moments of destruction, of downfall. There is a phrase by the Baroque writer Giambattista Marino that I once heard quoted on the radio. About to die, Marino realized that the yellow rose that, his entire life, he had sought to describe in his writings was none other than the yellow rose at the foot of his bed. And so everything I have sought to do has been to make photographs of that thing there, not only an idea about how to represent that thing. Or as Evans said, photography is a medium; it shouldn’t speak only about itself, but about the world.
All photographs © and courtesy the artist
Frongia: You have spoken about sequence, about series. What role do books play in the definition of your work?
Guidi: The book is the most rational part of work, the construction you do later, advisedly. With a photograph, instead, I sometimes don’t know why I do it; I do it and that’s it. Ideally the book should precisely respect the photographic sequence as it was shot. In prints and in books, unlike what Evans did and what I myself did at first, I never cut parts of the negative. I like for photographs to be seen as I have shot them, out of a sort of ontological respect for the camera, which entails a slight sin of hubris: not correcting signifies thinking one never makes mistakes. The importance of the sequence of the shots was confirmed to me in an encounter in Venice with photographer and curator Nathan Lyons in 1979. He suggested having an empty shot between one sequence and the next, in order to record on the contact print the interruptions between one period of work and another. In a certain sense this is the position of the psychoanalyst who analyzes the dreams one has, night after night, comparing the different dream-frames: Why, after photographing that chipped wall, did you photograph that pile of gravel, or that sky? And it is a method that is a bit
Surrealist, perhaps. But in the book the sequence is about communication; I want what I show to be intelligible not only to me, but also to others. Usually the problem is finding a visual connection between different moments. To achieve this result, I try to make sequences, not series, avoiding the creation of a rift between photographs, and working in a way so the subsequent photograph has a dialectic with the previous one. There must be a dialogue, but this dialogue is not literary. It is visual, between façades, between faces, between faces that look at themselves in the mirror, or look askance.
Translated from the Italian by Marguerite Shore.
