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The snapshot
The snapshot
April 23, 2025
Guido Guidi, Treviso, 1980
Courtesy the artist and Large Glass, London
The exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City presents works by the Italian photographer Guido Guidi (born 1940). The selection is summarised under the title The Vernacular and reflects Guidi’s preoccupation with the everyday. In an interview in 2015, published in Aperture Magazine (220), Guidi was asked about his sense for the vernacular which he shares with the American artist photographer, Lee Friedlander’s work, “I remember that I had seen Friedlander’s name in Ugo Mulas’s photobook New York: The New Art Scene (1967). As soon as Friedlander’s Self Portrait came out in 1970, I bought it, but it was only on the occasion of the lone photography biennial, Venice ’79, that I was able to meet him. That was when I heard him talk about the vernacular. He said he wasn’t interested in art photography, but in the vernacular photograph, in the snapshot. I could relate to this, of course, since I had grown up with the family photographs shot by my uncle, who had them printed at the photography store before gluing them into an album.”
Guido Guidi is a key figure in a group of photographers born in the 1940s who, in the 1970s and 80s, forged links between photography and other disciplines of literature and architecture, from urban planning to anthropology, in order to highlight the language and form of photography in Italian cultural expression.
Katrin UllmannGuido Guidi is a key figure in a group of photographers born in the 1940s who, in the 1970s and 80s, forged links between photography and other disciplines of literature and architecture, from urban planning to anthropology, in order to highlight the language and form of photography in Italian cultural expression.
Guido Guidi, Treviso, 1980
Courtesy the artist and Large Glass, London
Guido Guidi, Rimini Nord, October 1991
Courtesy the artist and Large Glass, London
Guido Guidi, Brooklyn, 2001
Courtesy the artist and Large Glass, London