"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."
