My Windows on the world photographic series uses framing devices to create a view through to something beyond. I take these photos as a way of suggesting the existence of the divine glimpsed between the lines or on the periphery of our vision.
The Italian photographer Guido Guidi has a similar vision and practice. His métier is close observation of ordinary things - the peripheral, the overlooked and ordinary: He explains:
"It is a way of bowing down before things. And that is the religious aspect, a respect for things, for the blade of grass and wanting to give back by means of a precise photograph, where the execution of the detail is perfect, absolute, with no grain. The photograph must be absolute, transparent and cannot be corrected and reviewed later. As Didi-Huberman says, for the ancient painters of the 1400s, the act of imitagere or copying nature was in itself an act of devotion. Not necessarily mastery or technical virtuosity but an act of devotion towards things, the “things which are nothing” as Pasolini says.”
The Italian photographer Guido Guidi has a similar vision and practice. His métier is close observation of ordinary things - the peripheral, the overlooked and ordinary: He explains:
"It is a way of bowing down before things. And that is the religious aspect, a respect for things, for the blade of grass and wanting to give back by means of a precise photograph, where the execution of the detail is perfect, absolute, with no grain. The photograph must be absolute, transparent and cannot be corrected and reviewed later. As Didi-Huberman says, for the ancient painters of the 1400s, the act of imitagere or copying nature was in itself an act of devotion. Not necessarily mastery or technical virtuosity but an act of devotion towards things, the “things which are nothing” as Pasolini says.”
For Guidi, as Charlotte Higgins has remarked, ‘his work is not about the decisive moment but the “provisional moment” – the idea that this moment is one of a procession of many.’
Very often, his images ‘show some kind of aperture – a doorway, a window, the arches of a portico, even the edge of the lens itself.’ A photograph is a frame, he says, ‘and if you put a frame in the picture, you are suggesting that this is not the whole world, that there is something outside.’
As with his close observation of the peripheral and provisional, this device has a religious aspect as these photos direct our attention to what is beyond.
Guidi's work can be seen Guido Guidi: Per Strada at Large Glass until 21 December.
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Ringo Starr - Photograph.
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