Guido Guidi | VERAMENTE in Amsterdam
Guido Guidi had originally wanted to be an architect or a painter, but during his studies at the University of Venice he began to develop an interest in photography. By the mid-1960s he had devoted himself entirely to photography. Guidi directs his camera towards urban architecture, industrial landscapes, and periurban environments in an entirely original way. His approach is poetic and attentive, and could also be said to be descriptive in nature. His photographic work has given rise to a rich visual archive of the landscape of Italy, both natural and man-made.
Calais, France, 04.1996 © Guido Guidi
Guido Guidi
Veramente
14 June – 7 September 2014
Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography
Amsterdam
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Info _ Guido Guidi (born in 1941, in Cesena, north-eastern Italy) had originally wanted to be an architect or a painter, but during his studies at the University of Venice he began to develop an interest in photography. By the mid-1960s he had devoted himself entirely to photography. Guidi directs his camera towards urban architecture, industrial landscapes, and periurban environments in an entirely original way. His approach is poetic and attentive, and could also be said to be descriptive in nature. His photographic work has given rise to a rich visual archive of the landscape of Italy, both natural and man-made. In 2013 Guido Guidi won the prestigious PixSea Oeuvre Award, resulting in his international breakthrough. […]
Elblag, Poland, 08.1994 © Guido Guidi
Architecture and photography | The young Guido Guidi studied architecture at the IUAV (Università di Venezia) – an institution founded in 1926 and specialized in architecture and design – and then attended the Corso Superiore di Disegno Industriale in Venice. His teachers included such famous architects as Carlo Scarpa and Luigi Veronesi, whose work has continued to strongly influence his own.
As a photographer of the urban environment, Guidi concentrated on the changes he saw taking place in the contemporary landscape. He wanted to document the Italy nobody knew; life in the margins of Italian culture at its urban ‘edgelands’, border areas that defied conventional description and for which a new idiom needed to be invented. Working outside the constraints of an established viewpoint, and with no prescribed iconography to follow, Guido Guidi developed an entirely original vision of this environment. He looks at it as if he were ‘to one side of his subject, or in its shadow’, as Marta Dahó writes in the exhibition catalogue. […]
Guido Guidi’s close relationship with architecture can be felt in much of his photography, such as the series he made of the Brion Tomb sanctuary built between 1970 and 1978 by the architect Carlo Scarpa, who had also given Guidi lessons in photography. Guidi has spent years photographing this monument at different moments during the day and in different seasons, using his camera to explore the building’s fundamental principles and the glimpses it affords of the relationship between time and space.
Parallel to the Guido Guidi show another exhibition is on view: Taco Anema | Dutch Committees [Nederlandse Besturen] about a peculiarly Dutch phenomenon: there is a core population that develops initiatives in sectors of society in which government and business are either inactive or ineffective. To get things done in this country, the Dutch surround themselves with like-minded people, go to a notary, and start an association or a foundation. They do this work voluntarily, they do it unpaid, and they are utterly confident that they will succeed. And they’ve been doing this for centuries. One encounters this phenomenon in all layers of Dutch society, irrespective of social, religious or geographic background, and the Netherlands’ ‘newcomers’ are no exception. It has become an inherent part of Dutch identity.
Info + illus. courtesy Huis Marseille
