Over the course of his 77 years, Guido Guidi has lived in the same neighbourhood just outside Cesena, a town in north-east Italy between Rimini and Bologna. It is flat, agricultural country, a landscape of straight lines: ploughed fields, a wide horizon, overhead wires, the long trundle of the old Roman road, the Via Aemilia, and the parallel rush of the A14 motorway. It is the landscape of his photographs, too, in which he has summoned up not the picture-postcard version of Italy, with its pretty countryside and medieval towns, but the peripheral, the overlooked and ordinary: the hastily built agricultural building by the highway; the straggle of buildings at the edge of town that the visitor usually rushes past. Even when he does venture into the centre – as in a series of images of Cesena from the early 1980s – he offers it up to the viewer as defiantly ungrand, shabby, a place like any other.
A new book, Per Strada (On the Roads), which is accompanied by a small exhibition in London, draws together more than 200 photographs from the 1980s and 90s of this closely observed territory. He might show the corner of a rather plain church with a municipal rubbish bin shouldering into the shot; or heaps of blackened, weeks-old snow in front of a dingy palazzo with a bricked-up window; or the shuttered, blinded facade of a tobacconist’s with a shadow playing delicately over it.
For many years, eschewing digital technology, Guidi has mostly used a large-format, 25 x 20cm camera – the biggest and bulkiest he can carry on his own, he says, its negatives the same size as the resulting print. The detail is vast. In a photograph of an ordinary glass-fronted door there is such a material density to the cracked paint on its frame, the brass fittings of its lock, that the fact of the print’s shiny flatness is almost overwhelmed. Reflected in the glass of the door is the image of a tree, slightly distorted by the faint curvature of the pane, and beneath it the ghostly faces of two children flanking the enigmatic black blob of the camera itself.
Guidi is a small, neat man in Le Corbusier-style black glasses who speaks in immensely quiet, allusive sentences. He often quotes other photographers – Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore or his fellow Italian, Luigi Ghirri – or refers to the artists of the 15th century, such as Brunelleschi, Uccello and Fra Angelico, of whom he has an encyclopedic knowledge. We speak in his studio – in his house which he shares with his wife, Marta; over dinner at a nearby restaurant; and finally, over lunch in a local citizens’ club. In these places he is greeted affectionately and sometimes teasingly by other elderly men, most of whom he has known his entire life.
He relates his scrutiny of his territory’s edgelands and peripheries to the facts of his own life. “I was born in the countryside,” he says. “There was not yet this ‘edgeland’, but biography and geography are bound together.” Gradually, the margins of Cesena crept outwards and enveloped his home. The motorway was built close by; you can see its slip-road arching away, only 100 metres or so from his driveway.
“The history of the city is like an egg,” he says. “The ancient city was like a boiled egg, with clear edges bound by walls. Then the city became a fried egg, its edges spread out. Nowadays, it is a scrambled egg, with no form.” When he was a student, studying design and architecture in Venice in the 50s, “we used to talk about this non-shape of the contemporary city. We were thinking about how to represent this city without form in art.” Anyway, he points out, the periphery is not an objective point: one person’s periphery is another’s centre, and “the centre is where you are”. He adds: “If you want, there is a subtle political message – though I would put it no more strongly than that – in my choosing to photograph this room, or one of my neighbour’s houses.”
In this age of the scrambled-egg town, the centre is where the old monuments are, but not, for the most part, people’s lives. And, while he acknowledges the importance of photography that captures great historical dramas – political speeches, wars – his work insists on the importance, even transcendence, of the apparently unremarkable. He mentions a recent exhibition in nearby Ravenna devoted to the work of Magnum photographer Alex Majoli, who was born and studied in the city; he is known for his work in conflicts such as the Afghanistan war. “There wasn’t a single photograph of Ravenna in the exhibition,” says Guidi, in wonderment.
The photographs are often grouped in sequences, so that turning the pages of Per Strada you see a procession of similar shots following one from the other, or sometimes a single building shot from slightly different angles. (One series of his photographs, not part of this latest book, consists of 16 images taken in an empty room in Treviso during a single day; all that changes is that the square of light thrown from the window travels around the room). These sequences partly reflect the rhythm of his work. With his heavy camera it takes time to set up each shot, and his process is measured and slow compared with the speed at which photographers shooting digitally can work. “Many times I’m not looking when I press the shutter,” he says. “Chance is very important.” He doesn’t crop: there’s a kind of rigorous honesty to the pictures.
Above all, the photographs argue against the idea of a “decisive moment”, to quote the title of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s most famous book – they refute the notion that the photographer’s job is to capture a turning point, a denouement, to depress the shutter at the moment that captures the essence of an event or scene. According to Guidi: “All moments are decisive – and none.” His work is not about the decisive moment but the “provisional moment” – the idea that this moment is one of a procession of many. Very often, they show some kind of aperture – a doorway, a window, the arches of a portico, even the edge of the lens itself. “It’s part of the game,” he says. “After all, a photograph is a frame, and if you put a frame in the picture, you are suggesting that this is not the whole world, that there is something outside.” It’s another form of honesty. With these gentle reminders that the picture is just a picture, he is showing his workings and hinting at his own subjectivity.
One of the photographs in the book and exhibition stands apart from the others. It’s not a landscape, but a still life: a dish of impossibly scarlet cherries sitting on a copy of the newspaper La Repubblica. You can’t see the date on the paper, deliberately (though in fact the photograph was taken in 1985, and one of the headlines refers to that year’s Italian presidential election). At one point, Guidi says that he considered using the image as a kind of frontispiece for the whole book. The image is a memento mori: those cherries will rot, that paper will be out of date tomorrow. That effect is all the more accentuated because, like all of the photos in the book, it was taken several decades ago: these other things too have passed, long ago. It’s a reminder that memory and the photographic image are inextricably bound together. As Susan Sontag once wrote: “To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture.” Guidi says: “All photographs are monuments. If you photograph this cup on the table, for example, it gives it importance. And over time, photographs become more and more like monuments.” In the case of Guidi’s pictures, modest monuments to the dignity of the everyday.
Per Strada is published by Mack Books. The accompanying exhibition is at Large Glass, London, until 21 December.
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