I'm very pleased to have a review of Guido Guidi's new book
A New Map Of Italy (
Loosestrife Editions, 2011) in the latest issue of
The Brooklyn Rail (Oct. 2011). Read the rest of the issue
here and pick up a copy of the Rail if you are in NYC - it's one of the best publications around.
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Covering the last 20 years, Guido Guidi’s new book
A New Map of Italy is an excellent introduction to a seminal Italian photographer. Edited and designed by the photographer John Gossage,
A New Map of Italy
draws from Guidi’s vast archive of images and past books, but also
contains many previously unpublished photographs. Like his influential
forefather and near contemporary Luigi Ghirri, Guidi is a photographer
whose gritty Neorealist-influenced documentary work is little known and
underappreciated in the United States. Working in the tradition of
Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, and Stephen Shore, Guidi’s large format
color photographs are full of surprises and pictorial sophistication.
Using an 8 by 10 view camera, Guidi’s work is largely concerned with
the contemporary Italian social landscape, and eschews the picturesque or
romantic. For the past several decades, Guidi has photographed the
liminal and man-altered landscapes of contemporary Italy and Europe.
While this is a well-trod (and often cliché) subject for photographers,
Guidi’s work is distinct and compelling. Along with portraits of
strangers and friends,
A New Map of Italy focuses on the rugged
back roads, trash heaps, scratched walls, dilapidated villas, and
abandoned construction sites of Italy to form a complex portrait of a
country in decline and flux. Deadpan, weatherworn, and elegant, Guidi’s
photographs offer a grim metaphor for the state of Italy.
© Guido Guidi and Loosestrife Editions, 2011
The view camera that Guidi employs is an awkward but highly precise
instrument. Prized for its hyper-real clarity and rich tonal rendition,
it also allows users to manipulate the camera’s plane of focus and
correct convergent lines in architecture. Heavy, cumbersome and
notoriously difficult to master, the camera is handled effortlessly by
Guidi, resulting in images that resemble casual snapshots. At the same
time, Guidi’s pictures are visually astute and complex—the minor
distortions and shifts of focus subtly drawing our attention to the act
of looking. Even Guidi’s restrained palette, a muted sun-bleached cyan
tone, seems to defy the camera’s intended purposes and matches the
images’ restrained, utilitarian aesthetic.
© Guido Guidi and Loosestrife Editions, 2011
© Guido Guidi and Loosestrife Editions, 2011
Measuring roughly 10 by 12 inches,
A New Map of Italy’s
elegant design allows the photographs to take center stage. The book’s
end-pages are an especially nice touch. On both the front and back
endpages are paired photographs of walls and corners—first leading
readers in and around a corner into the book, and then ushering them out
at the end. The book also contains two essays by Gerry Badger and
Marlene Klein. Badger is one of the preeminent photography critics, and
his essay is especially worthwhile. Too often essays in photo books are
disposable, pedantic filler. Fortunately, Badger is insightful, astute,
and thankfully, free of academic or theoretical jargon.
Quoting Lincoln Kirstein’s afterword in Walker Evans’s seminal book,
American Photographs,
Badger draws a direct parallel with Evans’s work of the 1930s. As
Kirstein wrote, “here are the records of an age before an imminent
collapse. [Evans’s] pictures exist to testify to the symptoms of waste
and selfishness that caused the ruin and to salvage whatever was
splendid for the future reference of survivors.” Like Evans, Guidi’s
images are brutally honest, but also deeply affectionate. At the same
time that they indict the “symptoms of waste and selfishness,” they
celebrate the quotidian beauty of the land and its people.
© Guido Guidi and Loosestrife Editions, 2011
Another major influence in Guidi’s work—along with Italian Neorealist
film, Conceptual Art, and other large-format documentary
photographers—is the photographer Luigi Ghirri, a towering figure in
Italian photography whose influence can be seen throughout Guidi’s work.
The two not only share a similar palette, but also an appreciation for
their native Italy’s quotidian beauty. The book’s use of the map can be
read as a nod to Ghirri, who not only photographed and loved maps, but
also produced a body of work on the subject entitled
Atlante.
As the book’s title and the cover photo of a faded map suggest, the
work is a remapping, or alternative mapping, of modern Italy. Dense and
complex, Guidi’s self-professedly “ugly” pictures provide a deeply
nuanced exploration of the contemporary Italian landscape. The broken
landscape, buildings, and solemn portraits of Guidi’s work form a
narrative of contemporary Italy in flux, but rooted in the commonplace.
As Italy and its European neighbors plunge into economic and political
turmoil, Guidi’s images point beyond the mythic past or turbulent
present to an honest and gritty reality of his subjects and the country
he loves.
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