Preganziol, 1983

Thirty years ago in 1983, Italian photographer Guido Guidi created a short photographic series, taken inside a room in Preganziol, Italy. The sixteen images which make up Preganziol, 1983 were taken within the confines of four bare walls. The only light is emitted through two windows which sit crossways from one another.

Preganziol, 1983 is, at first glance, a simple exploration of light, a photographer’s exercise in how to define and describe physical space within a photograph and how light shapes these descriptions. On closer inspection the series is multi-layered: Guidi’s portraits of a room alludes to the idea of the camera obscura; exterior vistas allude to the Albertian window; blank walls create an aura of emptiness and abandonment; and the shifting of light across the walls signifies the movement of time.

Guidi’s skill as a photographer and craftsman of the image is evident here, and this conceptual sequence is charged by a leitmotif running through Guidi’s work: the void, the knowledge that beyond the frame reality goes on unfolding, immeasurable, endless.

Guido Guidi was born in Cesena, Italy, in 1941. He studied in Venice at the University Institute of Architecture (now IUAV), where he followed the courses of Bruno Zevi, Carlo Scarpa and Mario De Luigi, and at the Advanced Course in Industrial Design with Italo Zannier and Luigi Veronesi. He has worked as photographer at IUAV Department of City Planning since 1970, and has taught photography at Ravenna Academy of Fine Arts since 1989 and at IUAV – where he holds the Laboratory of Artistic Techniques and Expressions – since 2001.