The MAN summer programme explores the cultural and political context of the contemporary Mediterranean world.

The show opening on June 21 will be the first major exhibition at an Italian museum devoted to Guido Guidi (Cesena, 1941), one of the most important names in Italian post-war photography. An exhibition curated by Irina Zucca Alessandrelli and produced by the MAN in partnership with ISRE, Istituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico della Sardegna, Guido Guidi. In Sardegna: 1974, 2011 will feature 232 unpublished photographs illustrating Guido Guidi’s relationship with Sardinia, some taken during his first visit in 1974 and others in 2011, the year he worked on an important commission on the island for ISRE.

The exhibition provides both an anthropological and environmental account of the changes that took place on the island over the course of four decades, exploring the medium of photography by juxtaposing black and white images from 1974 with colour pictures from 2011.

Faces and traces of human presences, as well as dwellings, dirt tracks and pools of water, become the subjects of a story without protagonists, uncovered by the encounter with the photographic lens. This tale told through images illustrates how Guido Guidi’s style developed over the years.

The exhibition occupies the four floors of the MAN and is arranged according to the timeline of the photographer’s two visits to Sardinia and the different photographic techniques he used. The first part features the black and white photographs taken in 1974 with a Nikon camera and 55mm lens, “the same camera used by the star of Antonioni’s Blow-up and also by Ugo Mulas,” as stated by Guidi. The exhibition continues with the colour photographs from 2011, some taken with a digital camera and others on analogue supports, in medium format with a super wide camera and in large format with an 8x10 wooden field camera, “like the one used by Walker Evans a century ago, with his head under the hood,” continues Guidi.

Looking at these images today allows to enjoy places and details that are often unrecognizable now, but also to observe, more than ever before, the evolution of Guidi’s working method spanning the four decades of his relationship with Sardinia. A creative journey and the ripening of a style that is already apparent in the images from the first journey, re-emerging even more strongly in the photographs from 2011. For today’s visitors, the comparison between these two periods of Guido Guidi’s photographic production is a rare opportunity to understand the originality of his work with respect to the Italian and international scene.

The works on display, reprinted by the artist for the exhibition, are documented in a three-volume catalogue in a slip-case published by MACK Books in London and comprising texts authored by Irina Zucca Alessandelli, Antonello Frongia and Luigi Fassi.

The exhibition has been made possible thanks to the contribution of the Region of Sardinia, the Fondazione di Sardegna and the Province of Nuoro.