Di sguincio, 1969–81 gathers more than a hundred black-and-white photographs Guido Guidi made with small-format cameras between 1969 and 1981. The title—meaning aslant, asquint, or seen from the corner of an eye—describes both the pictures’ oblique address and their resistance to an immediately legible documentary view. Made without looking through the viewfinder and illuminated by a bright flash, these images register people, bodies, gestures, minor events, and fragments of space as sudden, sometimes abrasive encounters.

The book’s subjects remain close to Guidi’s everyday life: his family home in Cesena, friends sharing an apartment in Treviso, and colleagues at the Institute of Architecture at the University of Venice. Yet proximity does not produce simple intimacy. The photographs are stark, occasionally near-abstract, and charged by a performative tension between the camera, the person before it, and the act of looking. Their affection is inseparable from experiment, as Guidi tests how an image can be made when conventional framing and visual confirmation are set aside.

MACK’s 2023 volume reproduces Guidi’s own prints from the period, preserving their high contrast, unusual blurring and definition, and oblique handwritten annotations. These material traces matter: stamped, marked, and at times artificially aged, the photographs take the form of anti-documents that question photography’s claims to truth. They also situate personal fragments within the psychological, social, and political turmoil of Italy during an era of crisis and contested social values, absorbing influences from neorealism and postmodernism while seeking new forms.

For collectors, the book’s significance lies in the clarity with which it presents an early, searching dialogue between Guidi and his medium. Across 144 pages, time appears not merely as a subject recorded by photography but as something experienced, manipulated, and made unstable. Di sguincio is therefore a concentrated account of invention at the beginning of a lifelong inquiry into what photographic images can do—and what they cannot securely claim.