Di sguincio 1969–1981 by Guido Guidi

SIGNED COPIES

Di sguincio—meaning “aslant,” glimpsed from the corner of the eye—brings together more than a hundred black-and-white photographs Guido Guidi made with small-format cameras between 1969 and 1981. These pictures come from his earliest experiments with the camera: shot without looking through the viewfinder and struck by a harsh flash, they catch people, bodies, gestures, small happenings, and scraps of space in abrupt, sometimes abrasive encounters. Formally stark and occasionally close to abstraction, they remain rooted in the intimate and nearby—his family home in Cesena, friends in Treviso, and colleagues at the University of Venice—forming tender personal works that probe the performative tension at the heart of images.

The book reproduces Guidi’s original prints, with their high contrast, unexpected blur and sharpness, and slanted, sometimes barely legible handwritten notes. Brimming with the spirit of early invention and collaboration, these fragments also absorb the psychological, social, and political upheavals of an Italy in crisis, filtering influences from neorealism to postmodernism in a search for new forms. Time—recorded, felt, and manipulated—runs through them as a quiet constant. In Di sguincio, we encounter “anti-documents”: stamped, annotated, sometimes artificially aged images that gently undermine photography’s claims to truth and reveal the beginnings of Guidi’s lifelong exploration of the medium’s possibilities.