Di sguincio –which means oblique, squint or sideways– brings together more than a hundred black and white photographs taken by Guido Guidi with small format cameras between 1969 and 1981. These images record the first experimental dialogues between Guidi and his camera: Made without looking through the viewfinder and illuminated with a bright flash, they capture people, bodies, gestures, small events and fragments of space in moments of sudden and even abrasive encounter. Although formally rigid and even bordering on the abstract, they document people and places nearby: his family home in Cesena; friends with whom he shared a flat in Treviso; colleagues from the Institute of Architecture of the University of Venice, forming affectionate personal works that explore the performative tension at the heart of the images. This book reproduces Guidi's own engravings of the period, with their unusual high contrast, blurring and definition, and oblique, sometimes imperceptible handwritten annotations. Evoking the joys of invention and collaboration at the beginning of an artistic career, these fragments equally reflect the psychological, social and political turmoil of Italy in an era of crisis and questioning of social values, metabolizing the influences of neorealism and the postmodernism in search of new forms The fundamental photographic theme of time, as it is recorded, experienced and manipulated, is its elusive constant. With Di sguincio, we discover a set of anachronistic, sealed, annotated, and sometimes artificially aged anti-documents or records that wryly comment on photography's truth claims and reveal the foundations of a lifelong commitment to the possibilities of the medium.
The signed edition includes a tab signed by the artist and glued to the inside of the back cover.
Hard cover
30x24cm,
144 pages
English
