Guido Guidi’s Album, 1969–82 begins with an act of return. While arranging his archive, the photographer encountered negatives and prints from an intensely productive early period. Made on black-and-white film with small-format cameras, these photographs register the texture of his daily life in the 1970s: family, friends and colleagues at the University of Architecture in Venice. Alongside them appear deserted streets, isolated objects, shadows and signs—images in which ordinary observation becomes fragmentary or unexpectedly abstract.

The photographs are distinguished by high contrast and destabilising frames. Their documentary content remains legible, yet Guidi repeatedly pushes description toward graphic form and ambiguity. Traces of earlier use are also retained: partial captions, blurred annotations and other marks left by previous sequences or contexts. Rather than presenting the archive as pristine evidence, the book allows its working history to remain visible.

Guidi assembled this material into a new “album,” adopting a title he had used for several projects during the period, among them an unrealised publication associated with Luigi Ghirri’s Punto e Virgola. The result is therefore neither a straightforward facsimile nor a conventional retrospective. Historic photographs are reconsidered through a later act of selection and sequencing, bringing familiar faces and places into contact with stranger, less readily classifiable images.

Published by MACK in 2026, the 160-page volume is the second of three complementary books devoted to Guidi’s black-and-white work from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. For collectors concerned with the photobook as an edited form, its importance lies in that double perspective: it preserves evidence of an early practice while demonstrating how an archive can be made newly active. The tension between utility and art, realism and fabrication, is not resolved; it supplies the book with its distinctive structure and enduring interest.