Guido Guidi
La Figura Dell’Orante
48 pages
30 x 24 cm.
Softback
ISBN: 978-88-906449-5-5
Guido Guidi, a key figure of European photography, has spent three decades teaching and sharing his knowledge of photography at the University of Architecture in Venice, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna and at the institute of Industrial Arts in Urbino. Over this period Guidi has developed a personal philosophy about the language of photography which has informed his artistic practice. In this publication, conceived as a visual notebook, Guidi examines the silent language of communication through signs and symbols by excavating the work of masters of photography and italian classical artists, suggesting deep connections between them. Inspired by the famous mosaic of St. Apollinare in Classe in Ravenna, La figura dell’Orante is the first in a series of Guidi’s notebooks of great educational and artistic value.
Guido Guidi is one of the greatest living photographers. Over the course of his practice, Guidi has developed a cohesive body of work in which he examines the contemporary landscape and its transformations. He belongs to that group of photographers that in the early eighties have renewed the tradition of Italian photography through a different approach, more subtle, silent, and questioningly. His peculiar interpretation of the contemporary landscape has always been matched by a modern, complex, and often anticipatory reflection on the language of photography. Investigating marginal areas through the use of a large format camera, Guido Guidi creates dense sequences of photographs that reflects on the meaning of landscape, photography, and vision. Born in Cesena, Italy, in 1941, Guido Guidi began his career in the late 1960s. He He has worked on several photographic commissions focused on landscape and his work has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions, including Viaggio in Italia (1984); L’Insistenza dello sguardo, l’Invention d’un art (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989); Muri di Carta (1993); The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968 (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1994); L’io e il suo doppio (Venice Biennale, 1995); In Between Cities (2003); Metamorph Trajectories (Venice Biennale, 2004); Trans Emilia (Fotomuseum Winterthur, 2005); and, most recently, Dieci fotografi d’oro (2009). Guidi contributed to the exhibition Venezia Marghera: Photography and Transformations in the Contemporary City, organized in 1997 in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He has received significant photographic commissions from the CCA, among them Mies in America (2001) and Carlo Scarpa, Architect (1999). In 1995, he was awarded the Italian Photographic Book of the Year Prize for Varianti (Udine: Arti Grafiche Friulane), a monograph on his mid-career work that garnered critical praise for the excellence of its text and images. He has taught and given workshops on photography at various Italian universities and institutions since 1986.
