Light and Shadow

Guido Guidi – Preganziol, 1983

In 1983, and within the confines of small single room of an apartment or house, Italian photographer Guido Guidi undertook what at first glance could be considered a simple exploration of light. Here, in this unfurnished room with its two windows that sit diagonally opposite each other to one corner, Guidi produced a precise body of work — titled, Preganziol 1983 — that Roberta Valtorta describes in his essay “Space, Time, Void” as a “pearl of great price in contemporary Italian photography.”

A widely undervalued photographer, Guido began to experiment with pseudo-documentary images that interrogated photography’s objectivity in the late 1960s; and influenced by neorealist film and conceptual art he investigated the man-altered landscape of his homeland through the seventies, a body of work in which he created a frequently dense sequence of images that formed a meditation on the meaning of landscape and photography.

Although Preganziol 1983 comprises just sixteen photographs, it is a complex body of work that extends far beyond that of a simple visual exercise by a photographer who is attempting to describe the physical space of the room, to a series that explores time itself; and as such, and like his work of the seventies, it requires a commitment from the viewer to slowly decipher and understand the multi-layered images.

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