In Veneto

Guido Guidi's new book, In Veneto, 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 This book contains a selection of hitherto unpublished photographs that Guidi took between 1984 and 1989, using a Deardorff 8X10.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.