"A Casa", Guido Guidi at His Home Studio in Ronta

With a career spanning over five decades, Guido Guidi (b. 1940) is one of Italy's most celebrated photographers. Alongside Luigi Ghirri, his images have helped shift the way we look at the Italian landscape. His photographs of terrains vagues between urban and rural have travelled far and wide (and will soon be the subject of a retrospective at LE BAL, Paris), yet remain deeply rooted in his place of birth and the surrounding landscape.

On the occasion of his latest exhibition A Casa, on view at Large Glass Gallery in London, in collaboration with TIDE, photographer Tommaso Serra and writer Bartolomeo Sala travelled to his house in Ronta di Cesena, Emilia-Romagna, to explore how this place - at once his family home, studio, archive, and a meeting point for emerging artists - has shaped his approach to photography and continues to influence both his life and work.

Bartolomeo Sala Ronta, and in particular this house which was purchased by your parents, are a subject that returns frequently in your photographs. A casa collects both recent photographs and ones that were taken in the 1980s. The other day, I was taking a look at the catalogue of Col Tempo, and there as well you see Ronta crop up at different points.

Guido Guidi It is not natural, it is just handy. In my case, I don't have to travel kilometres every time and also it is at my disposal whenever I wish. If I am here, I might take a picture of a door. If I am in Berlin, I will take a picture of a different door, as if I am at my house in Berlin as well. But I can go to Berlin only once in a while.

BS The photographs included in A casa are very particular. It's a very self-contained selection, with many pictures repeating themselves with tiny variations. This of course is one of your signatures. But it's the selection as a whole that feels quite representative of your work as a photographer.

GG The idea for the exhibition is an offshoot of a show we wanted to make with [John] Gossage. A few years ago he came to the house and made a book from photographs taken around here. The first idea then was for him to come back to shoot my house. But then there was the problem of how to host him, because he wanted to stay here.

I had said to him, "maybe I can come to your house and you can come to mine." He replied that his house wasn't interesting, mine was. So we decided to do two exhibitions: the first with a present from him, a present from John; and the second with a present from me, even though I am still not sure what I am supposed to do.

As to why I photograph in a certain way, in the 1970s and 1980s, the new generation of young photographers like myself, Luigi Ghirri, and Vittore Fossati… We used to say we wanted to distinguish ourselves from amateur photographers who travelled to Sicily because Cartier-Bresson had gone there. On the contrary, our photography wasn’t dramatic or about great, heroic deeds. Our main influence was Dutch landscape painting, which was despised by no less than Michelangelo. He has very harsh words for it, he calls it “paintings for little monks and old women.” 

BS That’s very interesting, because I know you like to mention Piero della Francesca and early Renaissance painters as a big influence on the way you take pictures. But I never heard you speak of Dutch painting. 

GG I have spoken about it, but not much. 

BS Where does this love of the vernacular come from, be it the mundane architecture you are most known for or the humble agricultural tools that are included in A casa? 

GG Vernacular is a theme I have cultivated since I was an architecture student in Venice, perhaps under the influence of [architecture historian] Bruno Zevi, who would tell us about Frank Lloyd Wright and organic architecture, especially organic architecture.

He would also tell us about American vernacular architecture, Victorian houses made of wood and stone found nearby, whatever was at hand. Also, the kind of photography that we would normally call “spontaneous” or “snapshot”, Americans call it vernacular.

The places I photograph are of course contaminated by the arrival of modernity which, with great pain, erases the vernacular. Be as it may, the vernacular is a place that I enjoy and feel calm in, a place where no one is around to bust my balls and say, you can’t take pictures here. I am fine with taking a picture of a place wherever, whether it’s in a city or a factory. The real problem for me is to have the right light which to some extent transfigures what I am photographing. 

BS I am asking this because in this love of the vernacular I see two distinct interests or impulses, which at first may seem difficult to reconcile. On the one hand, you have a more “architectonic” interest, which, as you say, probably has to do with your studies and in which one sees echoes of Walter Gropius’ fascination for grain silos, the influence of Walker Evans, and American social landscape photography. On the other, you almost have a form of lay religiosity whereby any everyday detail or banal bit of third landscape becomes a window onto something else.

Do you agree with this assessment? 

GG  It’s not my job to tell. [Laughs.]

I remember when Carlo Scarpa finished the Brion tomb, he was interviewed by a journalist who asked him, “Professor, tell us about this space, give us your words about this metaphysical space.” He replied, “It’s a good place dove mangiare pane e salame [where you eat bread and salame].” [Laughs.]

BS I guess it goes back to this idea of simplicity, a lack of bombast and rhetoric. 

GG Yes, lack of rhetoric is part of the game, too. Franco Fortini used to say that in dialect you can write poems even about bread, but with Italian, you can’t because it is an erudite language, it would sound phoney, rhetorical.

BS So it’s the medium that in a way drives the research? 

GG Photography is a vernacular language, everybody uses it, not just artists. Daniel Arasse used to say that you could rewrite the entire history of painting starting from the paintbrush. Velazquez had a long paintbrush and painted almost like a swordsman. Turner instead had a much shorter brush and painted very close to the canvas. So inevitably, results were very different depending on the instrument. 

BS This reminds me of something sculptor [Giuseppe] Penone told me – namely, that once he was told by a blacksmith that iron naturally tends to bifurcate so it can’t be worked whatever way, but rather has to be “followed”. Same with every other material…

You are known mostly as a landscape photographer, although I am sure you find the label a little reductive. Rather than landscapes, the photographs in A casa seem to be “still lives”. I mean, the image of the slightly oxidized half apple on the paper towel must be one of the most mundane memento mori I have ever seen. But the same can be said of the photographs of agricultural tools – they are remnants of a bygone civilisation; the sickle, with its clear political connotations, stands for a whole ideology that’s now in shatters.

Is there a reason why you found yourself working more in this genre lately? 

GG I think the story behind these objects is that in some way I wanted to pay homage to my father who used these tools which are both agricultural tools and carpentry ones. My father was a carpenter before turning farmer, same as my grandfather. He used to say something similar, “wood has to be humoured, you cannot go against the rules of wood.” Adolf Loos used to say the same. If you want a chair, you go to a carpenter, not an architect. 

BS Your photographs are about what you sometimes called “pure visibility”. They register things as they are, without any commentary or superstructure.

Be as it may, I read in them – if not politics – at the very least an ethics, which is implicit. I am thinking of this famous clip of [Pier Paolo] Pasolini walking down an old Roman road and saying that this humble country path should be the object of preservation as much as the Colosseum or St. Peter. Do you agree? 

GG This aspect is inevitable. However, as [Iosif] Brodsky used to say, you never start from ethics. You don’t marry a woman on ethical grounds. But, in some way, ethics is always the foundation. 

BS The two speak to each other. 

GG When I go photographing, I usually settle on a project. I say to myself, tomorrow morning I will get up at 7 and will go take photographs in such and such places. Then after a few kilometres driving I say, damn, I have already driven too much. I should stop and take a few pictures here otherwise the day will be wasted. I stop at the first bit of shade, park the car, and shoot what’s there. It’s a sort of exercise which I used to do, now less. I say, what am I going to shoot? That tree. I pitch the tripod and then shoot another tree, to throw me off. [Laughs.] 

BS Does this have to do with your idea of photography as a sort of automatism? I have read somewhere that you were quite influenced by Zen philosophy when you were young. 

GG When I was in middle school, two friends of mine and I bought a little book about judo at the newsstand. It came with a cassette and pictures, and my friends and I would go to San Mauro and would practice by looking at the illustrations. It was a rather odd sight at the time because we lived in the countryside, after all.

In high school – I went to an arts college – those were the years of Art informel, which of course has a close relationship to Zen. Later on, when I was already in Venice, I remember the Academy of Fine Arts inviting a monk. One of those who write haikus, a Zen monk. It was an extraordinary experience to see how he worked – first, getting a piece of rice paper, then wetting it with some water, then waiting for it to dry, when almost dry, taking a bucket of ink, and the paintbrush like a broom… He observed a pause, like a pole vaulter or a hammer thrower. He would concentrate and then in a moment, it was done. Although the poem would keep happening, so to speak, as the paper kept on drying.

After this, there would be a long pause in which the monk would choose whether to rip up the poem or to keep it. He would spend ten minutes like this, deciding where to put his signature, which is of course the opposite of the gesture itself which presupposes the suspension of the will, any will whatsoever. 

BS To wrap things up, in one of your interviews, I read a sentence of yours that felt particularly revealing, “geography is biography.”

For anyone who grew up around here, your house and the landscape that surrounds it are synonymous with the Padan Plain – the sort of third landscape between urban and rural that you and Ghirri first put on the map in Viaggio in Italia. How much did this landscape have an influence on your sensibility and way of photographing? 

GG A lot, it influenced me a lot. If you look at certain things, you train your eye on them, then obviously they become [your subject]. Merleau-Ponty used to say, “if you look at a stone, you become the stone.” If you look at certain rocks, they somehow become part of your mental make-up, so you are drawn to observe them again. If you live somewhere else – say, Milan – maybe, there are stones there, too. But there are mostly shop windows, so you spend your days shooting shop windows. You are yourself a shop window, you have digested it and made it your own, so to speak.

When I was young I wanted to be a painter, but then decided to study architecture because I observed the experiences of my father and grandfather doing woodwork. I remember my grandmother giving me a little hammer and pincers designed specifically for a child.

The exhibition A Casa is on view at Large Glass Gallery, London, until February 28, 2026.

Images: Courtesy of Guido Guidi and Large Glass Gallery, London

Words: Bartolomeo Sala

Documentary images: Tommaso Serra

Photo Credits, in Order of Appearance

Cover Guido Guidi Ronta, 2017 

1 Guido Guidi Ronta, 03/01/2017, 2017 

2 Tommaso Serra 

3 Guido Guidi Ronta, 2023, 2023

4 Tommaso Serra 

5 Guido Guidi Ronta, 04/2020, 2020 

6 Guido Guidi Ronta, 01/06/2025, 2025 

7 Guido Guidi Ronta, 2023, 2023

8 Tommaso Serra 

9 Tommaso Serra