Background
Guido Guidi was born on January 1, 1941, in Cesena, Italy.
Santa Croce 191, Tolentini 30135, Venice, Italy
Guido studied at Università Iuav di Venezia.
Guido Guidi was born on January 1, 1941, in Cesena, Italy.
Initially, Guido studied at Università Iuav di Venezia. Later, he attended the School of Advanced Studies in Industrial Design in Venice. In addition, he attended different courses, including those, offered by Bruno Zevi, Carlo Scarpa, L. Veronesi and Italo Zannier.
Guido Guidi has taken pictures since 1956. After various early experiments with black-and-white photography, started at the end of the 1960's, he began using colour negatives in a large-format camera, notwithstanding the apparent banality of the views, which would seem to call for rapid shots. At the same time, however, Guido was attached to small prints too. Also, it was in the late 1960's, that Guidi began experimenting with pseudo-documentary images, that interrogated photography’s objectivity.
In the 1970's, influenced by Italian Neorealist cinema and by Conceptual art, Guido explored the man-altered Italian landscapes and directed his attention to the marginal and anti-spectacular areas of the Italian suburbs. Afterwards, his research extended to Modernist architecture, which he has documented extensively through projects, focusing on the works of Carlo Scarpa, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.
In 1989, Guido began teaching Photography at Accademia di Belle Arti in Ravenna, a post he still holds. Also, since 2001, Guidi has held the position of a teacher at the Design and Art Faculty at Università Iuav di Venezia, Venice.
During his career, Guido has shown his works at different exhibitions, including those, held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Arts in New York City, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, as well as during the Venice Biennial.
Currently, besides his work as an educator and photographer, Guidi is a member of the scientific committee for the project "Linea di Confine" (Rubiera, RE).
Guido's method is based on questioning rather than explaining. His works show what common place is, sites not yet completed or in ruins, neglected spaces, where the human beings, who sometimes appear in the series either pose conspicuously within a well-defined frame or pass by accidentally in the distance. The photographer uses the expression "momentary decision" to describe the way he shoots, with no pretence of decisiveness, a relationship to time, which is just the opposite of the "guillotine blade" of photographers, intent on capturing the rapid instant.
Guidi’s eye is looking for something pure. In the end, he does not really know whether this is documentary or fiction, but it is anchored in the real.
Quotations:
"I'm interested in a more difficult beauty, one that slips away: the moment when the gaze is transformed."
"In the moment that I take a photograph of something, I feel that I am that thing. I am what I photograph in the moment that I am photographing it…it is as if I am praying."
Physical Characteristics: Guidi is a small, neat man in Le Corbusier-style black glasses, who speaks in immensely quiet, allusive sentences.