18 ★ FT Weekend 17 August/18 August 2019Spectrum
US during which he photographed the
small, everyday details of his existence
— Guidi’s first trip to Sardinia empha-
sises how the camera can transform vis-
ual perception. This is clear in his use of
the wide-angle lens, but in other
instances he moves with greater sub-
tlety; for example, by including a sec-
tion of the car window — and his reflec-
tion in it — within the picture, thus
transforming the vehicle into a second
camera: one viewing device framed
within another, leading the gaze
through multiple filters in a sort ofmise
en abyme.When he returns to Sardinia in 2011,
there is a change in tone — and the use of
colour and the sharpness of the large-
and medium-format cameras (a Dear-
dorff 8x10 and a Hasselblad 6x6) could
easily make us forget the mediation
worked by technical means. Guidi
presents us with a new landscape: an
insistent confrontation with surfaces at
a very short distance. Walls, doors and
windows are almost always closed, so
that only the rays of the sun can formu-
late new apertures and new volumes in
them. Could this be a reminder of Ber-
tolt Brecht’s declaration, invoked by
Walter Benjamin and often repeated in
histories of photography, that a photo-
graph of a factory reveals nothing about
what is happening within its walls? Fol-
lowing this line of thought, Guidi seems
intent on gathering the seemingly insig-
nificant details provided by the fabric of
the things he photographs so closely,
while showing the degree to which the
camera conditions and directs our gaze.
“Sometimes in what I do, there is an
attitude of polemic or displacement
with respect to an academic tradition,
with respect to the 19th-century tradi-
tion that invited photographers to
depict monuments,” he says. “But the
monument can be anything, like Fox
Talbot photographing a haystack, for
example. I’m interested in things that
are habitually overlooked. Attention
towards an insignificant detail that
transforms into something essential.”
In his work on Sardinia, Guidi takes us
down side roads to observe the margins
of the landscape and — the antithesis of
“the decisive moment” — rejects the
rhetoric of the single image. His photo-
graphs are more than representations of
what is visible: they are the traces of a
process, of a photographic practice and
thought as they come into being. They
point in a direction where, a priori,
there is nothing to see, where there is no
expectation that anyone would pay
attention; a direction that teaches us to
be wary of overly conclusive images.
Rather, his invitation guides us towards
what we thought we already knew;
it urges us to retrace our own steps,
look again and discover what treasure
the landscapes in our peripheral
vision hold.Translated from the Spanish by Kevin
Gerry Dunn. ‘In Sardegna’ (2019) by Guido
Guidi is published by Mack and the MAN
Museum, Nuoro, Sardinia, where ‘Guido
Guidi in Sardegna: 1974, 2011’ runs until
October 20; museoman.itI
n July 1974, soon after they were
married, the Italian photographer
Guido Guidi and his wife drove with
a friend across Sardinia. They trav-
elled around the island for two
weeks, though it wasn’t a tourist trip in
the typical sense because Guidi was
working. His pictures of the idiosyn-
cratic architecture of small towns and
the passing encounters with their resi-
dents weren’t just his record of the trip,
they were also an indication of the way
he was looking and thinking with his
camera. In these early images we see the
Sardinia he was drawn to, moulded by a
medium in which — as he put it later —
he had decided to allow himself certain
“offences”: looking where he wasn’t
expected to, veering off from an estab-
lished route, seeing what emerged when
he stepped out of accepted photo-
graphic conventions.
“The first trip was a kind of initiatory
journey,” he explains, talking to me
recently. “It was a pilgrimage. We
wanted to see it all. I liked using the
wide-angle lens a lot because it enabled
me to be fast, to take photos from the car
window, embrace as much as possible,
even though it wasn’t in a way that was
ostensibly calibrated from a formal
point of view.”
Guidi had only just set out as a photog-
rapher, though the direction of his per-
sonal interests had already begun to
take shape. His pictures of Sardinia are a
clear example of his budding photo-
graphic thought. But it would be
another 35 years before — thanks to a
commission from the Istituto Superiore
Regionale Etnografico della Sardegna
(ISRE), in 2011 — Guidi found a way to
extend the work he had begun so many
years earlier. The result of these trips is
now the subject of a new book,In Sar-
degna: 1974, 2011, and an exhibition at
the MAN museum (Museo d’Arte Pro-
vincia di Nuoro) in Sardinia.
Divided into three volumes — the
1974 trip and two tours in 2011 — the
book underlines the foundational
thinking of a photographer whose work
focuses on territory typically excluded
from the traditional genre, his images
reflecting social changes in Italy and the
paradigm shifts that photography has
undergone since the 1960s.
“I’m interested in what’s happening at
the margins of photography itself,”
Guidi says. “As the poet and essayist
Joseph Brodsky once said in an inter-
view, ‘The periphery is the place where
the world spills over.’ ”The landscape Guidi has long fav-
oured reveals the material culture of its
construction, formed by its inhabitants:
the vernacular architecture in the Emil-
ia-Romagna region, which he began
photographing in 1971-72; the landscape
along the Strada Romea that he trav-
elled while working at the University of
Venice (1975-90); the industrial regions
of Porto Marghera and Ravenna
(1983-97); the urban growth along the
ancient route between Russia and San-
tiago de Compostela (1993-96).
It was an approach his education had
prepared him for. Born in 1941, he stud-
ied architecture, industrial design andphotography in Venice, where he was
influenced by the architects Carlos
Scarpa and Bruno Zevi and the photog-
rapher and historian Italo Zannier. He
went on to join a generation of photogra-
phers that included the Americans John
Gossage, Stephen Shore and Lewis Baltz,
and fellow Italians Franco Vaccari, Luigi
Ghirri and Vittore Fossati. In their vari-
ous ways, they would revise the notion
of landscape, a genre that, due to urban
and industrial growth, was struggling in
the late 1960s. They turned their atten-
tion instead to peripheral landscapes,
such as suburban streets, rural towns,
low-level urban developments, indus-
trial sprawl — places where the process
of transformation was self-evident.
Following premises like those devel-
oped by Shore in his 1972 series “Ameri-
can Surfaces” — a road trip through theSardinia in passing
The Italian photographer Guido Guidi’s landscapes of the island, made
more than 35 years apart, favour the peripheral over the monumental
All black
and white
photographs
were taken
in 1974July 12 2011— July 4 2011May 14, 2011
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