Guido Guidi (photographer)
Life and work. Guidi was born in Cesena, Italy. He enrolled in 1959 at IUAV and then at the School of Advanced Studies in Industrial Design in Venice. He followed, among other courses, the ones offered by Bruno Zevi, Carlo Scarpa, Luigi Veronesi, and Italo Zannier. He started taking pictures in 1956 and continuously in 1966. Since 1989 he has taught Photography at Accademia di Belle Arti in Ravenna and he is part of the scientific committee for the project "Linea di Confine" (Rubiera, RE). Since 2001 he has taught at the IUAV Design e Art faculty  in Venice. His later publications include "Per Strada"; "A New Map of Italy"; and "Carlo Scarpa's Tomba Brion". He has shown his work at the Guggenheim and Whitney museums in New York, at Centre Pompidou in Paris, at the Venice Biennial and at Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal. His work is held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and of the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Guidi began experimenting in the late 1960s with pseudo-documentary  images that interrogated photography's objectivity. Influenced by neorealist film and conceptual art, in the 1970s he began investigating Italy's man-altered landscape. Working in marginal and decayed spaces with an 8×10 large format camera, he creates dense sequences intended as meditations on the meaning of landscape, photography, and seeing. Later he investigated the life and death of modernist architecture, with projects on Scarpa, van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. Photography for Guidi is something autobiographical. It is synonymous with inhabiting, and the camera is the instrument that allows him to observe, appropriate and collect what lies beyond his  doorstep. "Guidi was a leading voice in the resurgence of Italian photography of the 1970s and 1980s". "Since then, working mostly in colour with a large-format camera, he has patiently returned to the same places – his native Romagna and the area around Venice – documenting the shift from a rural to a post-industrial landscape."