Tag: Walker Evans

Guido Guidi: more moments, more points of view

A major Guido Guidi retrospective at MAXXI in Rome, featuring over 400 works, including rare, unpublished pieces and archival materials, demonstrates the artist’s depth of study and preference for “more moments, more points of view” in which the visible reveals the intangible essence of things. Rica Cerbarano writes that the exhibition offers illuminating insights into the behind-the-scenes of ‘art-making’ and hopes young artists will take away the lesson that, for Guidi, practice is something carefully thought out and built over a lifetime.

Rica Cerbarano | Exhibition review | 10 Apr 2025

Guido Guidi’s major retrospective at MAXXI in Rome is a rare example of an artist’s decades-long body of work being presented without grandiosity, allowing for an appreciation of its true artistic and cultural significance. Structured across two interconnected planes – the vertical display of the walls and the horizontal arrangement of the display cases – Col tempo, 1956-2024 traces the evolution of Guidi’s artistic vision, revealing that he is far more than just a photographer of vernacular architecture and Italy’s marginal places. This is not merely due to the variety of subjects he has captured – always with an obsessive attempt to seek a seriality of photographic procedure – but, more importantly, because of the depth of study and research that have shaped his thinking.

The exhibition – curated by ​​Simona Antonacci, Pippo Ciorra and Antonello Frongia – features over 400 works, including numerous previously unpublished pieces and archival materials, following a curatorial narrative that offers precious insight into the ‘behind the scenes’ of art-making. At its core is a concept that proves to be illuminating for curious minds: his archive, adopted as a guiding framework for exploration, is highlighted also as a physical space through the account of the role that his home in Ronta di Cesena has played, as both a living space, a studio and a meeting place for emerging artists – a space where ‘personal biography and artistic process intertwine’.

Opening the show, the Preganziol series (1983) encapsulates the essence of Guidi’s artistic inquiry. Shot in an empty room in the province of Cesena, this work comprises 16 images, all taken within the confines of four bare walls. As the external light shifts, subtle transformations within the room become visible. Through this meticulous study, Guidi explores the passage of time and the way photography both interprets and transforms its subject. This symbolic introduction seamlessly leads into an exploration of Guidi’s evolving relationship with photography through 40 photographic sequences, curated by the artist himself, a three-channel video filmed inside his home-studio-archive – and an extensive collection of archival materials displayed in centrally positioned display cases.

This third level of the exhibition is crucial in fully grasping the depth of Guidi’s artistic vision, revealing how each image embodies a meditation on perception and the passage of time. The reconstruction of Guidi’s material universe begins with a selection of books from his personal library. These volumes – some of which are available for the public to browse – offer insight into the development of his research methodology. This collection extends beyond artist’s books and photobooks (including the catalogue from the Walker Evans exhibition at MoMA in New York, a pivotal reference for his practice) to encompass works on philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and a vast array of art history. Among the texts, one finds Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927) alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), John Cage’s For the Birds (1981), and Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel (1948). Essential influences such as Piero della Francesca, Giorgione and Paul Klee are also present, underscoring the diverse intellectual foundations that shape Guidi’s work.

These elements are all traces of what Guidi himself calls “eternal sonship” – an artistic practice rooted in imitation, references and citations. The study of his masters manifests as a meticulous formal investigation, a repertoire of subjects and compositions, echoes and correspondences that suggest the existence of a mental world woven from visual associations across distant epochs and disciplines. For instance, it is extremely fascinating to learn how, in his notes on two photographs by Walker Evans – prepared for a lecture on the American photographer – Guidi establishes a striking parallel between Evans’ Cottage at Ossining Camp Woods, New York, 1930 and Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection. In both works, as he notes, there are ‘on the left, trees without leaves; on the right, trees with leaves,’ highlighting a shared compositional structure that bridges photography and Renaissance painting.

Walker Evans’ profound influence on Guidi’s work becomes particularly evident in his exploration of façades, or “facce vista”, as noted in one of his commentaries – often accompanied by sketches and drawings analysing the composition of the works he discusses. As we can see in the sequence of façades presented in the exhibition, spanning 1970–1983, they mark a return to the square format and a more classical serial approach after a period of freer experimentation (for instance, the Di sguincio series), where photographs were instead the result of a ‘performance of the encounter’, unrefined and ‘rude’, allowing ‘to break out of the etiquette of aesthetic rules’, as Antonello Frongia writes in the book accompanying the exhibition, published by MACK in 2024.

Yet, this ‘rude character of his photography’ – what Guidi himself describes as the ability ‘to show things as they are, without refinement’ – also emerges in his study of façades, a subject that captivates him like a lover. Using a Hasselblad 6×6, he examined the ordinary postwar architecture of Italy’s provinces, capturing subtle variations in form shaped by shifting viewpoints and light conditions. Rather than adopting a taxonomic approach in the style of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Guidi’s method feels almost anthropological, evoking the portraiture of August Sander, as he emphasises the anthropomorphic qualities of these structures – that through the photographic frame turn into thinking entities, or more precisely, into observers.

This interest in vernacular architecture served as an entry point into Guido Guidi’s long-standing engagement with architecture, which actually began during his studies at the University Institute of Architecture in Venice. In the 1990s, his collaborations with the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal marked the first major international recognition of Guidi’s work as an artist, resulting in the start of a deeper engagement with architecture – leading to a series of commissions, exhibitions and publications.

Among the series dedicated to architects’ designs is the well-known documentation of the Brion Tomb by Carlo Scarpa, who was also his teacher. Guidi returned to this site for a decade, studying the interplay of light on surfaces and architectural geometries in what can be seen as a ritual of time. In this suspension between life and death, between light and shadow, Guidi’s definition of photography as ‘a form of prayer: a way to dignify things, to grant them presence’ is what resonates. It’s a process of waiting, in which the visible reveals the intangible essence of things.

Moving from one series to another hung up on the walls (from the early photographs collected here in Esercizi, Al mare and Attesa, to the research of the 1970s in Avanti e ritorno and Coincidenze; then from the works on Gibellina and the many other cities in the world, grouped here under the name “In Between Cities”, to the section dedicated to the “Officina cesenate”, his home-studio, and the study on the spaces of the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna, one of the schools where he taught), one can’t help but pause, observing the vitrines with curiosity and delight, where the theoretical and practical background of the artist unfolds. For example, alongside notebooks, early drawings and sketches of photographic compositions, we explore the technical aspect of his passion for photography, learning that in the early 1980s, he built several self-made prototypes of cameras using plywood. His experiments with printing are equally significant: after initially working with black-and-white photography in the darkroom and large-format techniques, over time Guidi fine-tuned his method of photographic printing and came to favour chromogenic contact prints.

Towards the end of the exhibition, some additional printing materials are presented, such as contact sheets and photocopies, selected by the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, revealing the significant attention Guidi gives to post-production and the organisation of images. The experience is like being momentarily in the photographer’s studio, feeling his hands on the proof prints, carefully focusing on selected photographs or portions of images to be used. Finally, a number of display cases present the meticulous work that Guidi carried out in preparation for his lessons, all focused on visual motifs central to his thinking: the idea of collimation and the logic of sequences and symbols like arrows, stains, shadows, graphemes, letters, and façades.

If this exhibition leaves a lasting impression, it is not so much due to its size (undoubtedly the largest anthological exhibition ever dedicated to Guidi) or the quality of the works on display, but rather for its ability to convey the complexity behind the artistic research of an artist who has played a hugely significant role in transforming how we perceive landscapes and approach photography today. By opening the doors to the artist’s archive – both physical and mental – the exhibition reveals to the public that photography is not a matter of moments, but of time. “There’s something about Bresson’s decisive moment that doesn’t convince me,” says Guidi in an interview, who prefers “more moments, more points of view,” clearly distancing himself from the notion of the “unrepeatable image.” His images are endlessly repeatable – always the same yet subtly different, slow, where the time that accumulates is not just that of the gaze and light, but also of thought, built over a lifetime.

Even if you have never attended a lecture by Guido Guidi, it is evident that one of the most important lessons his work offers is the value of taking time to think, develop one’s practice without haste, and observe and listen carefully, to build a web of references that ward off the danger of self-referentiality. There is hope that young artists visiting this exhibition will leave with at least a fragment of this awareness. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and MAXXI Rome. © Guido Guidi

Guido Guidi. Col tempo, 1956-2024 runs at MAXXI Rome until 27 April 2025

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Rica Cerbarano is a curator, writer, editor, and project coordinator specialising in photography. She writes regularly for Vogue Italia and Il Giornale dell’Arte, where she is the Co-Editor of the Photography section. She has also contributed to Camera Austria, Over Journal, Hapax Magazine, and Sali & Tabacchi, amongst others. In 2017, Cerbarano co-founded Kublaiklan, a collective that has curated exhibitions at Images Vevey (Switzerland), Gibellina PhotoRoad (Sicily, Italy), Cortona On The Move (Italy) and Photoszene Festival (Cologne, Germany), amongst others. In 2022, she was a member of the Artistic Direction Committee at Photolux Festival (Lucca, Italy), where she curated Seiichi Furuya: Face to Face, 1978 – 1985 and Robin Schwartz: Amelia & the Animals.

Images:

1-Guido Guidi, Tomba Brion, 2007

2-Guido Guidi, Cervia, 1979

3-Guido Guidi, Rimini Nord, 1991

4-Guido Guidi, San Giorgio di Cesena, 1985

5-Guido Guidi, Fosso Ghiaia, 1972

6-Guido Guidi, Palazzo Abatellis, 1997

7-Guido Guidi, Preganziol, 1981

8-Guido Guidi, San Mauro in Valle, 1956

9-Guido Guidi, Porto Marghera, 1988

10-Guido Guidi, Ronta, 2016

11-Guido Guidi, Ronta, 2004

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Writer Conversations #5

David Campany

David Campany is a curator, writer and educator. His books include Indeterminacy: thoughts on Time, the Image and Race(ism), co-authored with Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (MACK, 2022); On Photographs (Thames & Hudson, 2020); Walker Evans: The Magazine Work (Steidl, 2013); Photography and Cinema (Reaktion Books, 2008) and Art and Photography (Phaidon, 2003). His curatorial projects include #ICPConcerned: Global Images for Global Crisis (2020), The Lives and Loves of Images (2020) and A Handful of Dust (2015).

At what point did you start to write about photographs?

‘About’ is a complicated word. I first started to write during my undergraduate years. I was on a wildly ambitious 50/50 programme, half image-making, half writing, informed by a number of disciplines: semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, post-colonial theory, theories of institutions and ideology, aesthetics, phenomenology and film theory. Reading preceded any writing. Lots of it. I was struck early on by the difference between writings that began from the particular – this or that image – and writings that began with a theoretical abstraction, and deployed photographs as illustrations or examples. Both have their merit, of course, and I wrote in both ways at that time. Seven or eight years later, opportunities came my way to write for magazines and books, and I had to figure out if I could do something. By then, I had already been teaching for a few years. I suspect the daily practice of getting complex ideas into sentences comprehensible to students shaped how I began to write. As the years passed, I became somewhat averse to writing ‘about’ photographs, preferring to write around them, off them, in parallel, leaving the image as something for the reader to consider for themself. This came from the realisation of how little words can do in the face of the image, and to pretend otherwise was folly. That ‘little’ is vitally important, but it is little.

What is your writing process?

Everyone has their own creative rhythms and must accept them, because they cannot really be altered. I’m not all that productive but I don’t waste time. I usually work on two texts at once because I get stuck so often, and instead of doing nothing I can switch.

Most often, I write in order to find out what I think about things, and I try to write in a way that will carry me and the reader through that thinking. That means that the form of the writing is always in play, and cannot be taken for granted. I never know if a piece of writing is going to work out.

Occasionally, I’ve written polemics, and polemical writing was certainly the strongest kind I encountered as a student. I still relish reading strident texts, past and present. They do help to clarify. But I discovered I was temperamentally unsuited to that mode, which is premeditated and programmatic. Writing to discover what you think is quite different. It is speculative, risky, uncharted. Against that, I enjoy the parameter of the word count. If there’s no limit, my writing gets baggy. Not always, but often. (Maybe that’s why I’ve never blogged.) Interesting writing can be any length. A hundred words, a thousand, ten thousand.

What opened me up was the realisation that I could include images alongside my words. The richest experiences I’d had as a reader were with writings that included images, mainly in books on cinema. I liked it when the choice and sequence of images threaded through a text seemed almost like a form of writing. My own writing is done this way wherever possible. If I can get the ‘image track’ to feel interesting, to me at least, I can then begin to write. I don’t know of many other writers who do this. My interest in this approach is why I also became a curator and an editor of photographic books. There are parallels. I have often encouraged students to write this way, beginning with the choice of images. I’ve noticed it can work wonders for smart students who thought they had no chance of writing well, or in a way that they might enjoy and benefit from. If you fear the blank page, put an image on it. (Having the image on the page for the reader to look at for themselves is also a great discipline for a writer.)

I rewrite a lot. Partly, this is because my first drafts are lousy, but I’m trying to get my words to work well on the ear. I’m sure that comes from teaching, but also from the fact that I’ve always been impressed by good public speaking. If my words are dead to the ear, I know I need to rewrite. That’s not a rule for all writing. It just works for me.

The invitation plays a key part. I am fortunate in that institutions, publishers and image-makers often ask me to write. That element of surprise is really useful, as is the feeling of confidence one gets when someone likes your work and thinks you could do something worthwhile. I’m as likely to write for a little-known artist as for a major institution. Follow the work, not the reputation.

Sometimes I would rather not produce a text on my own, feeling I have more interesting things to discuss than to write. In these situations, I’m likely to suggest a conversation or written exchange, rather than an essay. Some of my published conversations – with Jeff Wall, Anastasia Samoylova, Stephen Shore, Sophie Rickett, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa and Daniel Blaufuks, for example – are among my favourite writings. I should say here that these conversations really are conversations. They are open-ended, speculative, responsive and all about the exchange of ideas. I know this project has the word ‘Conversations’ in its title, but it doesn’t really contain conversations. What I’m writing here is a response to a questionnaire: an efficient way to solicit formatted ‘content’. That’s why the questionnaire is such a dominant form these days. A conversation is the opposite.

What are the questions or problems that motivate your writing? 

Mixed feelings are the best motivation for me as a writer, and as a viewer. If my feelings are too clear to begin with, then there’s little in it for me. As for problems, I think the largest one has been the growing gap between writing that takes place in the academy (universities) and writing that takes place outside. I think this is worrying for a society. When I became a writer, having worked in a university for a while, that gap was already becoming very real, and I could see it had political consequences. The smart stuff wasn’t getting into the world, and when it did, it was not often understood. As neo-liberal capitalism marched its violent way onwards, the academy retreated from the public square, making its critiques and presenting its alternatives to its peer group, in ways its peer group appreciated. I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. As an emerging writer, I had to face that in a very immediate way. I made the decision, for good or bad, to publish outside of the academy. I’ve written very few “peer-reviewed” essays for academic journals, for example. (Seriously, who wants to live in a peer-reviewed culture? Sounds vaguely Stalinist to me. Sure, I want my brain surgeon to have read the right journals. Culture is different.) The essays I have written for academic journals were to see if I could do it on those terms, as an exercise. Once I’d ticked that box, I wanted other challenges, other audiences, which I didn’t know existed but I had a feeling they might. (I’m always fascinated to see how people who write about photography describe themselves. ‘Theorist’. ‘Art historian’. ‘Critic’. ‘Academic’. The aversion to the term ‘Writer’ says a lot.)

There is such anxiety around images. Rightly so, and for a lot of reasons. But there is a tendency for writing, for writers on the visual arts, to step in and overwrite, to attempt to supply the ‘script for looking’, to take away the anxiety the image produces and stabilise things. More often than not, this is prejudice and preference masquerading as reason. One sees this in everything from museum wall texts, to reviews, blogs and critiques. Images get ‘explained’ in terms of authorial intention, biography, strategy, what we ‘ought’ to be thinking, and so forth. This runs the risk of diminishing us all as viewers, patronising us while pretending to enlighten. Moreover, it refuses the essential ambiguity of images. There are forms of writing that don’t do this, that keep the door open, however awkward and painful that can be. Ambiguity, the openness of the image, can be an anxious problem… But it is the only way out, so we ought to embrace it.

The other problems that motivate my writing are self-imposed. They involve finding new relations between image, thought and language. 

What kind of reader are you? 

Pretty voracious and wide-ranging. I am also a re-reader. Texts can be returned to, in order to figure out how they were written, and as a way of measuring one’s own intellectual and emotional development. There are novels and philosophical essays I make an effort to reread every few years. They stay the same. I change.

How significant are theories and histories of photography now that curation is so prominent? 

I had no idea curation was so prominent. Nevertheless, writing is writing and curation is curation. They share some concerns and approaches, of course, but, as a writer and a curator, I’m interested in the differences.

What qualities do you admire in other writers?

Unimprovable sentences. The ability to get paid. (As far as I know, we’re all doing this project for nothing.)

What texts have influenced you the most?

Influence is largely unconscious, so don’t ask me. I am not being flippant. The answers we give about our influences are merely the answers we are able to give. Among my conscious answers, the ones that come readily to mind are the writings of Roland Barthes (on almost anything other than photography), Susan Sontag (same), Jacques Derrida, Fred Moten, Susan Stewart, Fredric Jameson, Raul Ruiz, Clarice Lispector, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Victor Burgin, Frantz Fanon, Adam Phillips, George Orwell, Lydia Davis, Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf. I would give a different answer tomorrow, I’m sure. Between what we know and what we don’t, there are hunches and intuitions. I have a hunch that the texts influencing me most profoundly were, and are, song lyrics. Words as sung. I cannot memorise a line of poetry, even if it means the world to me. I remember songs without even trying. I cannot imagine this has not had an effect, but I am not sure I could define it.

What is the place of criticality in photography writing now?

There are many places. It’s good to be mindful of this.

The space of critical refusal interests me. For example, how would discussions about identity take shape if one considered the possibility that the most interesting and profound things about identity do not offer themselves to the camera, to visibility? Or, what do we do about the fact that the narrowly consensual categories of both the mass media and art world demand certain conformities? At what points and in what situations might a commitment to photography be a walking away from it, and a turning towards something else, either as a maker, writer or viewer? There are photographers who face these questions and find other ways. And there are writers who have advocated for this too. The endless ‘commitment’ to photography, the presumption that all things of value can and must be available to its often-crushing and limiting embrace, is a very real issue. This should be faced as a matter of some urgency. (I don’t feel committed to photography at all costs, merely fascinated by it, and life beyond it is rich.) Critical refusal ought to be a vital part of the way photography is thought, discussed, taught and written. It should always be on the table. There are many positive signs that this is happening.♦

Further interviews in the Writer Conversations series can be read here.

Click here to order your copy of the book

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Writer Conversations is edited by Lucy Soutter (University of Westminster) and Duncan Wooldridge (Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London), upon the invitation of Tim Clark (1000 Words and The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University). 

Images:

1-David Campany

2-Book cover of David Campany, On Photographs (Thames & Hudson, 2020)

3–Book cover of David Campany, The Lives and Loves of Images (Kehrer Verlag, 2020)

4-Book cover of David Campany, Walker Evans: The Magazine Work (Steidl, 2013)

5-Book cover of David Campany, #ICPConcerned: Global Images for Global Crisis (G Editions, 2021)