Book Review Di sguincio, 1969–81 Photographs by Guido Guidi Reviewed by Blake Andrews “Photographers are a restless lot. Just when you think you’ve got one pinned down, they’ll take an unexpected detour. Consider the 82-year-old Italian master Guido Guidi. After a long career of innovation, teaching, and widespread influence, he had seemingly settled into a nice groove in his golden years..."

Di sguincio, 1969–81. By Guido Guidi.

Di sguincio, 1969–81
Photographs by Guido Guidi
MACK, London, UK, 2023. 144 pp., 11¾x9½".

Photographers are a restless lot. Just when you think you’ve got one pinned down, they’ll take an unexpected detour. Guido Guidi is a case in point. After a long career of innovation, teaching, and widespread influence, The Italian master had seemingly settled into a nice groove at 82. Ten years ago he’d collaborated with Mack to publish Preganziol, 1983, a gorgeous remembrance of shifting tonalities set inside one small room. That monograph was a breakout hit, and other titles soon followed. Guidi and Mack collaborated on seven more over the next nine years.

Although each monograph had its own theme and quirks, Guidi’s monographs often followed a similar blueprint. Every tome offered a deep dive into a single project from his vast archive. Some were mammoth, filling multiple volumes. Most were tidier. His pictures generally hewed close to home, exploring the region near Cesena, Italy with a large format camera and color film. His work was distinguished by an innate sense for color, the charming quirks of serial exposure, and the singular light of northern Italy. These components helped Guidi to stake out an aesthetic territory that was distinctly his, and recognizable at a glance.

Guidi’s latest monograph, his ninth with Mack, Di sguincio, 1969-1981 breaks with most past conventions (Lunario and Dietro Casa hinted in its direction, but we’ll set those aside for now). Not to say this book is forward-looking. Not to say this book is forward-looking. On the contrary, it hopscotches back in time, bypassing Guidi’s color era to drop in on his monochrome thirties. The title dates the photos from 1969 through 1981, but the vast majority are from a narrow time window, 1977 - 1980. As evidenced by these in-your-face transgressions, this was a period of serendipitous informalism for Guidi. It would eventually culminate in his transition to large-format color, when he turned the page on youthful happenstance. But that would come later. In the 1970s, he was knee-deep in the period’s snapshot zeitgeist. He used a hand-held camera loaded with b/w 35 mm film, supplemented with accessory flash. He fired away from close range, early and often. The photos recall Mark Cohen’s Grim Street and Barbara Crane’s Private Views (both shot roughly contemporaneously, then published later). Guidi’s are spicier and more intimate.

If the book comes across as somewhat half-cocked, that’s a fair description of his early methods. These are not refined visions, nor are they meant to be. Influenced by the early work of Sternfeld, Cohen and Nathan Lyons, Guidi favored spontaneity over thought. He often shot from the hip without looking through the viewfinder. Keep the pesky left brain at bay, or at least that was the non-thinking. The result? “They’re rather childish photographs. I took them joyfully, playfully,” he tells Antonella Frongia in the book’s interview. He compares “instant” photography with the automatic writing of the Surrealists and the instinctive approach of Jim Dine. “Photography has allowed me to access my unconscious in a very immediate way,” he says, in what might serve as a motto for this book.

Coming out of left field, and without much warning, Di sguincio lands as something of a minor masterpiece. Guidi’s touch is light and fleeting. His photos are stuffed with unexpected forms and streaks, a pleasure to browse. As usual, Mack’s reproductions set a high standard. Guidi took great pride in his original prints, and they’ve been faithfully duplicated with pencil marks, smudges and stamps. But the aspect which makes Di sguincio most enjoyably jarring is that it’s such a change of pace. Through book after book to this point, Guidi had carefully constructed an Italy of open spaces, ponderous contemplation and wise old brick walls. Di sguincio tears it all down without a second thought. These old pictures are claustrophobic, busy, flippant, irrepressible. If the formal color work is classical music, these have the energy of punk rock. You thought monochrome film snapshots were dead? It turns out they still live and breathe.

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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

Book Review Box of Illusions Photographs by Re’gis de Gasperi Reviewed by Meggan Gould "Photographic series about hands were added to my list of (playfully) banned subjects a number of years ago, where they would join cats and fire hydrants as too cliché-prone, and thus best avoided..."

Box of Illusions. By Re’gis de Gasperi.

Box of Illusions
Photographs by Re’gis de Gasperi

Witty Books, Italy, 2022. 128 pp., 7¾x9¾".

I pick up Re’gis de Gasperi’s Box of Illusions at photo-eye two days before I turn 46 (a detail with only minimal interest here). The book is narrow, elegant, softbound, dark. I am intrigued by the energy emanating from the images on my first flip through: a simultaneous frenzy and calm. Silver grains, unapologetic and brash, sometimes cohere into a recognizable form, other times blur into chiaroscuro abstractions.

Heat seeps from the images. A child rolls on the floor. Elevated temperatures emanate from dancing bodies, flailing bodies, sun streaming in through windows. I feel the windows as exits and prisons both. Precision is refused; all is blur, blear, bright murk.

A visually subtle, but very precise insertion of language interrupts the initial grainy reverie with an unmistakable date, timestamped on the side of a page: 16.3.2020. Ah, that feeling.

Pandemic parameters arise to surround the images: confinement, the all-too-real limits of a physical space and of our confinement companions. Boredom and the occasional unfocused joy. Moments of beauty and clarity amidst the granular tedium. It feels familiar, how time and space expanded and contracted in unpredictable ways. I note that this quarantine reality feels significantly sexier than my own quarantine reality. Sequences of still photographs splay across the book in multiple configurations, the pacing appropriately irregular. Sometimes we are grounded in the space of a few seconds with multiple feverish frames, other times we are frozen in the slow-motion blur of an extended shutter moment. Charcoal markings show the artist’s hand, holding sequences together or teasing them apart.

I finally turn to the essay, entitled Forty Six (46). In it, the photographer ruminates on the age itself (I indulge in the poignancy of our age overlap), on family, confinement, joy, floating, and dreams. The illusions of middle age are confined (boxed), illusions. The sentence I keep returning to, absurdly: “Lucid until then, the narrator bird flapped its well-structured wings and left the scene.”

The artist’s presence, as editor, voyeur and participant is omnipresent. I try to parse a page of scrawled text, snippets that I want to render poetic, but maybe it’s a grocery list. Annotations, both legible and illegible, in multiple fonts, harsh charcoal drawings, and interspersed English and Portuguese, undergird the sustained loving chaos. There is a sense of inscrutability that feels inevitable; surely no one else could possibly imagine how to make sense of our own individual muddles through this insane pandemic context. De Gasperi bares his own box, of both illusions and delusions, and in it I find comfort and pleasure. I leave the book feeling warmed from the Brazilian sun and chaos, though vaguely wishing that the narrator bird would flap back in to guide my own 46th year.

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Meggan Gould is an artist living and working outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of New Mexico. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,, the SALT Institute for Documentary Studies, and Speos (Paris Photographic Institute), where she finally began her studies in photography. She received an MFA in photography from the University of Massachusetts — Dartmouth. She recently wrote a book, Sorry, No Pictures, about her own relationship to photography.

Book Review Puglia: Tra albe e tramonti Photographs by Luigi Ghirri Reviewed by Brian Arnold "When I teach beginning photography, I try to emphasize the importance of curiosity. I tell my students that an insatiable sense of curiosity is just as important as equipment or tools. This doesn’t exclude any conceptual or critical rigor, but in my mind, it is still the most essential characteristic of any good photographer..."

Puglia. By Luigi Ghirri.

Puglia
Tra albe e tramonti
Photographs by Luigi Ghirri

MACK, London, UK, 2021. In English/Italian. 288 pp., 8¾x10".

“Luigi would often stop in silence...It was not just a place where he could rest a little, but one where he perhaps felt and acknowledged himself finally empty and ready to experience the wonder of being there in the world, in the world where ‘there is nothing old under the sun.’”

— Gianni Leone

When I teach beginning photography, I try to emphasize the importance of curiosity. I tell my students that an insatiable sense of curiosity is just as important as equipment or tools. This doesn’t exclude any conceptual or critical rigor, but in my mind, it is still the most essential characteristic of any good photographer. Wonder and curiosity are enough to drive a lifelong investigation of the medium, especially when combined with a strong literary, historical, psychological, or philosophical sensitivity. A deep love of photographic craft can still make the world feel surprising; a camera in the right hands can also lead to a deeper understanding of how much love and humanity still exist in this discordant and confusing world.

Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri provides a perfect example of how much can be discovered if you approach the world with enough curiosity, and Puglia, his new book with MACK, provides remarkable evidence of such. My first time through this book reminded me of my first experiences with John Szarkowski’s books about Eugene Atget, providing a feeling of profound photographic discovery and affirmation. Like these Atget books, each page of Puglia feels like a masterpiece of modernist photography – characterized by a remarkable attention to formal and technical details, and a patient, humble, and caring approach to the landscapes and people around him.

Located along the Adriatic coast, Puglia is not as well documented or touristed as Rome, Venice, Cinque Terra or Tuscany, but is nevertheless full of a rich cultural history. For close to 10 years, Ghirri explored the totality of Puglia with his cameras, but many of the pictures were made in Bitonto, a small city or commune within the larger city of Bari. Like many Italian cities, Bitonto is filled with brick streets and buildings that appear hundreds of years old. Walking these streets, Ghirri focused on the residential and daily life, looking at the people and the landscapes that seamlessly integrate the past and present (in the accompanying texts, the phrase there is nothing old under the sun comes up time and again), reminding us that the they are one and the same. Ghirri successfully embraces sentimentality without falling for anything saccharine or nostalgic, instead representing a place full of love and humanity, simplicity and humility, and somehow effortlessly existing outside of time, being contemporary and full of presence while evoking a rich history that imbibes the simplicity of the pictures with an historic grandeur.

Throughout Puglia, we often see multiple views of the same scene. In one photograph Ghirri shows us a sleepy store front with one man sitting alone out front, in the next frame he’s joined by his friends for conversation and coffee. We see children acting out a wedding procession on a street corner, with the next frame showing the same corner emptied. Other times he shows us multiple views of the same architecture, changed by the shadows or his walking of the landscape. Collectively, this approach lends the book a delightful cinematic quality, breaking free of the decisive moment and instead showing a more animated interpretation of an ongoing presence. The book does provide some quotes from Ghirri in which he shares some of his working strategies and philosophies, substantiating this cinematic quality as an essential part of the photographer’s vision:

“My way of interpreting through telling a story is simply that of managing to work with stronger images, so that some points are more evident and others less so; a method that is very close to literature, but also to cinema. Cinema has moments of greater overall intensity with more narrative moments or with pauses, which are nevertheless necessary for the comprehension of the film. Translated into photography, it can be a sequence, or shots of different distance, or different moments of approach…Images conceived to strengthen another, or offset another, or contrast with another, so that the narrative is not dull and lifeless.”

Coupled with this narrative approach, Ghirri brings an incredible understanding of photographic form, using light and shadow to create photographs that are deceptively simple, truly complex, and dynamic arrangements that reveal an incredible understanding of shape, balance, depth, and form. Indeed, Ghirri uses an original approach for understanding the play of shadow on architecture which ultimately make many of the spaces he photographs appear so much more elusive, all grounded with an incredible sensitivity to light. Page after page of Puglia, Ghirri demonstrates a remarkable ability to organize pictures, playing with light, shadow, color and shape in ways that appear simple but are clearly the result of patience, mastery, and an infectious love of photography.

The most exciting and innovative aspect of Ghirri’s photographs is his use of color; I cannot think of another color photographer who sees and understands white like Ghirri. The best comparison I think of is Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, which provide a remarkable meditation on degrees. While working with a broader palette than Rauschenberg’s paintings, Ghirri’s pictures nevertheless have a similar richness in their subtleties and embrace white like no other color photographer.

Puglia is divided into three basic sections. The bulk of the book is composed of Ghirri’s pictures, with around 200 photographs made between 1982-1990, printed just one per page. After the photographs are the accompanying texts, three different pieces that help contextualize Ghirri’s pictures and accomplishments. The final section is a series of 100 thumbnails which show the photographer’s original edit of his pictures from the region for an early exhibition of the work. Seeing Ghirri’s original sequencing of the photographs is interesting and presents a more narrative approach to the pictures than offered in this publication, and a very sharp acumen for developing visual relationships and ideas.

In the book’s final essay, “Ghirri: Fotografia, Sturttura, Romanzo (Ghirri: Photographs, Structure, Novel),” is by renowned Italian art historian Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, who provides a rich and insightful look at Ghirri’s work, career, and photographic philosophies. Quintavalle breaks down Ghirri’s work by first looking at his theories about images and narrative, citing the photographer’s own writings (from the beginning of his career, Ghirri wrote prolifically about photography): “I tried to construct and design whole works, and constructing whole works or projects meant thinking about a form of narrative through images, rather than a construction of single images.” He then looks at the evolution of Ghirri’s visual vocabulary over time, looking at the evolution of works as different and innovative as Kodachrome and Cardboard Landscapes, all leading to Quintavalle’s remarks on Puglia. He closes this essay with a close reading of the pictures, presented with important background information to help contextualize and understand Ghirri’s photographs from Puglia. Quintavelle walks us through the book, almost page-by-page, looking at the individual pictures, sequencing, and some of the ideas behind the book’s design. He points out the technical challenges and discoveries Ghirri confronted making these photographs (the white walls and the harsh sun of southern Italy, specifically), explains the sophisticated compositional and conceptual strategies the photographer developed while picturing the people and architecture of the region, and addresses the narrative strategies at play in book.

For those already familiar with Luigi Ghirri, Puglia provides incredible insight into his work and career, highlighting a body of work that further solidifies him as an essential contributor to the development of photography in Italy. For those not yet familiar with his work, this book is a wonderful introduction into the pictures, strategies, and theories of an innovative, imaginative, disciplined, and insightful photographer. With a substantial collection of photographs created across Puglia, and the insight of the accompanying texts, Puglia provides an incredibly thorough look at Ghirri and how he engaged a landscape and community.

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Brian Arnold is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.