Album, 1969–82

Le livre

While organising his archive, Guido Guidi rediscovered negatives and prints from a prolifically productive period at the beginning of his career. These photographs, made with blackandwhite film and smallformat cameras, captured his daytoday life in the 1970s – his family and friends, his colleagues at the University of Architecture in Venice – but also more fragmented and even abstract scenes: objects in disarming isolation, shadows, symbols, and deserted streets. High contrast and disorienting framing made many of these images as graphic as they were documentary. Some were marked with the remnants of captions, halfsmudged notes, and other signs of their lives within previous sequences and contexts. Taking up a title he had used for a number of projects at that time, including a neverrealised publication with Luigi Ghirri’s Punto e Virgola, Guidi constructed a new ‘album’: a fresh engagement with historic work, drawing on the anarchic energy and interests of his youth and the shrewd, sensitive instincts of an expert editor. The resulting book brings together the everyday with the bizarre, the recognisable with the ambiguous, in a bracingly contemporary new work from a modern master. Album, 1969–82 is the second of three complementary volumes engaging with Guidi’s blackandwhite work from the late 1960s through to the early 1980s, offering luminous insight into the development of his practice and an expanded exploration of photography between art and functionality, realism and surrealism, truth and fabrication.