Lunch with photographer Guido Guidi

Guido Guidi travels although he doesn’t really like to move. And he’ll take you with him. In order to get to know him and to understand his work, your journey begins from his home in Ronta, near Cesena (where he was born in 1941). He welcomes you into a stark and simple space, rich in knowledge, ideas and thoughts.

The journey you take with him will not follow any logic of space or time. His interest and understanding of art, literature and the world entirely melt time to form a magnificent present. His chosen travelling companions range from a neighbour to Carlo Scarpa to Leon Battista Alberti. His tone of voice is phlegmatic and constant, an echo of the places that he has been photographing since the 1960s: apparently ordinary marginal landscapes that all share a resemblance, whether the countryside outside his front door or distant European countries. And then there is his architectural photography. The ability to see, and show, multiple perspectives from the same spot, with minimal movement. The unique nature of his work has made him one of the most admired photographers in the world, among his fellow photographers first and foremost. When you finally depart, you are left with images, phrases and the desire to find a tool that is yours and allows you to see in a way you have never seen before. For Guidi, photography is exactness. A mystery hidden behind his mathematical formula and at the same time a performative act.
SB

Let’s start from right here, your home, which I feel speaks volumes about you and the way you approach things and look at things. Did you grow up here?
GG

No. “I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland by zinc-gray breakers that always marched on in twos. Hence all rhymes, hence that wan flat voice...” [he quotes Josif Brodzkij’s A Part of Speech, Ed.]. I wasn’t born here, no, this was my mother’s home. I lived in a different part of the countryside. My father and grandfather were artisans, carpenters. I come from an artisanal background and that’s why I studied architecture, although I really wanted to paint.
SB

And then in the end you did neither.
GG

To begin with, I alternated painting and photography but then I gave up on painting, I don’t know why. Photography seemed faster.
SB

How did you get into it?
GG

When I was 13 or 14, one of my classmate’s father was a photographer who took our school photos. My uncle had one of those cameras with the bellows and he took photos of me when he came to our house. I had no idea about refined photography, just the homemade kind.
SB

That’s what we all discover first: the family, domestic sphere.
GG

Yes, one of the pillars of photography. Anyway, a year later, my grandfather asked me what I wanted as a gift and I asked for a camera, without really thinking about it. And so, I was given my first camera, an old large format 6x6 with bellows.
SB

Do you like large format cameras? What do you prefer?
GG

I’ve used them all really, I used a Laica 24x36 for a long time; I’ve even built some myself.
SB

What is it that fascinated you about photography?
GG

The exactness of it. Exactness is the opposite of atmosphere. Turner found mystery in fog, I find it in exactness, mathematics and numbers. The medieval theologians used to say that you could only see the face of God through a lens. The lens is a mathematical formula. To me, photography is knowledge, a means of discovering the world, not a way to express the mystery of the world. The mystery of the world is in things. If you photograph a glass, the photograph isn’t more mysterious than the glass. Photography tries to become the glass in order to understand the mystery of the glass.
SB

You almost have an “eastern” approach, especially when it comes to finding the value and dignity in simpler things.
GG

Yes, perhaps you’re right. As Walker Evans said, that seat is beautiful in its own right, it is already a work of art. Quite the opposite of Duchamp who selected an object and transformed it into a work of art. The presumption that an artist can add extra value to an object is a harmful attitude in my opinion.
SB

What do you find interesting?
GG

That something can be truer than true and make you forget that it is a substitute. Behold the man, behold the glass. You should forget that it is a surrogate.
Guido’s neighbour Gino arrives for his daily afternoon visit. He finds a full house what with me, Francesca and Guido’s assistants. He stays for tea and pastries. The conversation lingers on the pastries. Guido selects one with fruit, he has the satisfied expression of somebody who has a sweet tooth but keeps it in check.
SB

I see Panofsky’s Perspective as a Symbolic Form on the table. What’s your stance on it?
GG

Perspective did not start out as a symbolic form but a form of measurement for architects, a “misuratio” as Leon Battista Alberti called it. However, it was immediately adopted by painters to measure space and position things within space. It was in fact used in the Annunciation, a complex theme to illustrate. How to measure mystery? Certainly not by any concrete means. Leonardo was irritated almost immediately by the idea of perspective conceived as a central and mathematical vanishing point. Hence the emergence, during the High Renaissance, of a perspective that used infractions and with it the symbolic form. Hubert Damisch said that perspective was what allowed craftsmen to become artists. Forced to use mathematics, they were transformed into “hommes de lettres”. Renaissance painters had to be creative at all costs. Artists are vain, as we know. But they should learn to be humble like Beato Angelico and Piero della Francesca. Humility was preached by the medieval monks: painters were to be thrifty, they weren’t to drink or lie with women and were to be honest and not boastful. With the Renaissance and the power of the nobles over the church, this equilibrium and the hold of religion fell apart.
SB

Going back to perspective...
GG

It’s had its ups and downs. Plato criticised the natural perspective because it was too subjective, in the High Renaissance it was criticised for being too mathematical, which is the exact opposite. In the twentieth century, the Impressionists abhorred it: they found it too mechanical and inadequate for pulling vomit out of oneself like someone possessed.

The medieval theologians used to say that you could only see the face of God through a lens. The lens is a mathematical formula. To me, photography is knowledge, a means of discovering the world, not a way to express the mystery of the world.

SB

What did you study?
GG

I failed Latin and English in secondary school but then I got a pass on the understanding that I followed an artistic curriculum. I went to the Ravenna Artistic School and myself and some other boys boarded with a lady. My companions were Antonio Andreucci, who later became a well-known architect in Florence, and Primo Costa, a painter who unfortunately committed suicide at a young age. They were older than me. Once I showed them a drawing I had done using natural perspective and Antonio taught me the rules of artificial perspective. I liked it a lot and I later made my living drawing perspectives for engineers and architects. It was almost a religion.
SB

And photography?
GG

Photography, while its caricature, comes from perspective. It has taken on its role. Because ‘fine arts’ have abandoned perspective for the flat surface.
SB

What is your relationship with conceptual art? I have the feeling you wouldn’t feel comfortable being defined a conceptual artist.
GG

To answer your question, we have to return to the fifteenth century and a chronicler by the name of Lucio Villari, who sang the praises of the Monkey Painter, who aped nature. He imitated nature so well that he replaced it. Once photography was born in the nineteenth century, it wasn’t long before ironic cartoons about photographers began to emerge. A camera wielded by a monkey, for example. An unwitting compliment. In antiquity, that ability to imitate and reproduce was praised. Reality replaced so faithfully as to replace reality.
SB

Which painter would you call the “monkey painter”?
GG

I think that Antonello da Messina is a very precise painter, as is Giovanni Bellini. Exactness, a vituperate description of the world, is important to me. Through description of the world, I inevitably speak of myself but this is transposed and transferred. It is not direct. As St. Augustine said, signs are either “signa propria” or “signa traslata”, emblematic of something else. Returning to the fifteenth century, Cosimo de’ Medici said that “every painter paints himself”, referring to Filippo Lippi, to which Savonarola replied, “every painter paints himself, but as a painter not as a man.” That is how you can recognise every painter and photographer, because they photograph themselves, not as themselves but as a photographer. Which is very different to the concept of expressing oneself.
SB

Is this your approach?
GG

Yes. I take photographs and I never retouch my work, like Beato Angelico... All this staged photography, studio prep and conceptual work.. They call me conceptual... I am anti- conceptual, I do not conceive beforehand, I do not visualise a previously conceived concept. I am the exact opposite of conceptual.
SB

You say that photography is a “device to help us see better”.
GG

Yes, to help us see clearly. I see things afterwards, not during. But everybody says that.
SB

How much instinct is involved?
GG

I don’t even realise what I’m doing. I think that I am as Evans described: a medium. Giulio Paolini said that the idea of the landscape that we see through the window doesn’t reach us while we are looking, but only later, when we have closed the window. Only with memory. That is another reason that I don’t correct my work. If I take five photographs, I exhibit all five of them, because they are variants and because I took them, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken them. It’s just as Vasari says when speaking of Beato Angelico: “It was his habit never to retouch or to redo any of his paintings but, rather, always to leave them just as they had turned out the first time, since he believed that this was God’s will.”
SB

It feels like you place great importance on the role of the unconscious.
GG

Yes, it is the medium that teaches me, the tool that teaches me. And I learned this from Informalism, not from Conceptual Art. My work does contain some history of Informalism. Chance and speed. Alongside a certain eastern doctrine... the composition of the haiku.
SB

Speaking of chance, I happened to be thinking about haikus as I made my way over here this morning. I enjoyed an excellent wine called Haiku from Castello di Ama a few days ago and I was reflecting on the similarities between that form of poetry and your photographs.
GG

There are definitely similarities. More so in the years ‘79-82 or when I was at secondary school in ‘52-53. The information at the time all came from Informalism, Conceptual Art came later.
SB

Your work reveals your bond with this land, your home and this area. One might think that traveling is not your thing yet in reality you have travelled extensively.
GG

I have been on a lot of return journeys.
SB

Do you leave joyfully?
GG

No.
SB

Do you return joyfully?
GG

Yes (laughs).
SB

Do you think that travel is overrated as an act of discovery and growth?
GG

I think that travel helps. As Ezio Raimondi said, there are tourists and then there are pilgrims; I belong to the second category.
SB

And where have you been on pilgrimages?
GG

Places very far away from here. America, northern Europe or the East. I didn’t take a camera on my first trips so I could just see the places and not record them. Then I promised I would return.
SB

And did you return?
GG

Never to the same place. I practise at home... you have to keep practising.
SB

Does that mean that much of the work you did here was travel practise?
GG

Yes, non-spiritual practise, or perhaps it is spiritual (laughs).
SB

What are you preparing and practising for now?
GG

Not much at the moment, I am reviewing, these are more sedentary months as I am working on the book. I am my own editor-in-chief. I am taking stock of everything; the book will be conclusive.

They used to say that the figure of the saint had to flow from the context, instead of being something set in stone. It is the same with my figures. If the context is missing, there is no relationship with the world.

SB

It feels like the ideal means to represent your work: the sequences, time and light.
GG

I’ve always been a bit against books, even though professors of mine, such as Italo Zannier, always said that the book was the finalisation of the photograph. For me, photography is above all a performance, a way to connect with things while taking the photograph. Like Pollock. The book might come later, but before it is a printed image, it is this connection that documents an event.
SB

You are more interested in the act itself.
GG

Exactly. I’ve actually got thousands of negatives that I’ve never printed. I haven’t had time. Then I think, which shall I choose? This negative or that one or that one. No, all of them. That’s my thought process.
SB

That’s where your sequences come from.
GG

The sequence follows, it reinforces the idea of photography as a mental process of discovery not communication. If it is communication then it is self-communication.
SB

And the person looking?
GG

The person looking puts themselves in my shoes... and tries to self-communicate!
SB

From this point of view, the process is fundamental.
GG

The process is everything! I learned this from Carlo Scarpa. He said that you should never finish anything because then you’d die. He had us use very hard pencils for drawing so that even if we erased something, the sign of that transformation would still be visible. Photography is what transforms and I must acknowledge the transformation, not solely the object.
SB

And in what position do we find ourselves when looking at your photography?
GG

In my place. You should be transformed too, like I was transformed by photographs and the paintings of Piero della Francesca and Giotto.
SB

What are your thoughts on portraits and the people who inhabit your photographs?
GG

It happens and they are there. Sometimes they are friends, sometimes strangers. I usually answer this question with the instructions of Leon Battista Alberti who would suggest that painters occasionally inserted a figure into their work to define the dimensions of the landscape and help the spectator to identify themselves. The people I put in my photographs have a catatonic expression, I would never permit anybody to express judgement or appreciation!
SB

Of course not! I was thinking of emblematic, timeless figures.
GG

Yes! They used to say that the figure of the saint had to flow from the context, instead of being something set in stone. It is the same with my figures. If the context is missing, there is no relationship with the world.
SB

Continuing to see is a wonderful skill.
GG

It is my job, this is what I can do and only this. I can’t even speak English. I studied it but got nowhere. I feel uncomfortable when I travel but I travel less now.
SB

Where would you like to go?
GG

South to Portugal, Spain or Greece.
SB

Would you travel to photograph?
GG

Yes otherwise I get bored. I get bored even walking around here without my camera.
SB

How do you choose which places to photograph?
GG

Convenience, because they are here... Even when I did that project on Via Emilia with Ghirri, I left the house and immediately started taking photos before I had even got to Via Emilia. I was supposed to photograph all the way to Parma and Piacenza but I’d run out of film by Forlimpopoli.
SB

How does this work when you’re travelling by car?
GG

In the best moments, I would take photographs from the window as I drove, on a small format camera.
SB

And there was I thinking that the tripod was vital...
GG

It is. I bought a tripod for my first camera in the 1950s and then I used to borrow one from school. I sought exactness. The action had to be fast but precision was equally as important, just like in Informalism. We might say that Informalism would never have existed without photography.
SB

A lot of people call in here, do you like having visitors?
GG

Yes I do, I’ve always liked visitors.
SB

Do you travel alone?
GG

I used to much more but I had a couple of car accidents... I get distracted.
SB

Because you are looking around.
GG

Yes, but I don’t take photos when I’m driving anymore.
SB

Wise.
GG

I picked up a hitchhiker once when I was travelling back from Venice, a licensed carabinieri officer, but I kept taking photographs as I drove... the first time we stopped at the service station he invented an excuse and disappeared.
SB

You scared him off.
GG

Laughs
SB

What is the significance of the addition of text, numbers and signs to some of your photographs?
GG

I used to write on them to emphasise that photography is a form of writing. People have always written on photographs.
SB

Even the sequences you create can be seen as a form of writing, they are almost musical in a way, certainly rhythmical.
GG

Yes, musical forms might be right actually, I liked minimal music... It’s a long train of thought to do with time.
SB

Tell me about time.
GG

It all starts with Brunelleschi, who used to make mechanical clocks. On the one hand is the question of measuring space with perspective, on the other hand the measuring of time. Not hourglass time but continuous time. The history of measuring the world goes hand in hand with discovering the world. You can’t know how to do something unless you study it, and the same applies to transformation. If I had photographed Scarpa’s Brion Tomb without capturing the transformation of the arrow, I would have lost the process. Scarpa draws on the wall with shadows, time and transformation. As though in a film. John Berger spoke of the fluidity of photography. A fluidity of time that is not solely applicable from photograph to photograph but even within a single photograph. The edge is where the photograph begins, not where it ends. It isn’t the centre that’s important but the edge. And a painting isn’t what it represents but what it transforms, as Claude Lévi-Strauss said. While Winogrand said that the photographer sees how reality is transformed once it becomes photography.
SB

And what do you say?
GG

That they are both right.
SB

Speaking of painting, what is your relationship to Morandi? His ability to inspect, to look at the same objects and same places over a long period of time and yet always render them different?
GG

He is a painter that I really love. I grew up with his legend. Jim Dine gave me a deep understanding of him with his exhibition at Palazzo Correr. He said that photography was a shortcut to the unconscious and that the exhibition was a homage to Morandi. There was a large painting, a classic Still Life with bottles and a skull. I was baffled. I didn’t think that Morandi put skulls in his work but then I looked more closely and realised that the skull is there, in the space between the bottles, in that void. That’s where you have to look in Morandi’s work, not just at the objects. At the space, not the objects.
SB

Space is essential in your work.
GG

Emptying the mind is a fundamental action.
SB

Are you able to do so?
GG

No, but I can when I photograph. I don’t think of anything, I might sing.
SB

Are you religious?
GG

I am religious but secular.