In Veneto, 1984-89

"Guidi’s eye is rigorous and subtle" – The New York Times

"[In Veneto] mostra un paesaggio in mutamento verso l’urbanizzazione, quello del Veneto centrale, con fotografie quasi immobili" / "[In Veneto] reveals a landscape undergoing a transformation toward urbanisation – that of central Veneto – with photographs almost devoid of motion" – Il Post

"Guidi esplora il Veneto centrale, lontano dalle bellezze veneziane o palladiane ... come crepe disordinate, o muschi o funghi, allargandosi fuori dai corpi di Padova, Vicenza, Treviso" / "Guidi explores central Veneto, far from the Palladian glamour of Venice: […] the irregular cracks, mosses and fungi that sprout from the built environments of Padova, Vicenza and Treviso." / –Rivista Studio

Guido Guidi’s new book, In Veneto 1984-89, opens with a big eye framed in the blind of a shop window in Mestre, an eye which, by opening like a sort of warning, announces the origin of photography itself. This book contains a selection of hitherto unpublished photographs that Guidi took between 1984 and 1989, using a Deardorff 8X10. This was the first time he had used a large format camera for a whole project, which concentrated on an area in the central Veneto, an area known for having rapidly turned into a deeply uncertain, marginal landscape, one intimately hierarchy-free. The places he visited, in the provinces of Treviso, Vicenza, Padua and Venice, seem to be almost part of the same drawing, of the same place, bearing stark testimony to the process of change that has led to the transformation of a huge rural area, driving it into a form of fragmentation known as urban spread. The photographs in these much-loved places seem to re-evoke the three truths described by Robert Adams in “Beauty in Photography”: geography, biography, and metaphor.