Between 1976 and 1981 Guido Guidi carried small-format cameras through places ordinary enough to be overlooked, and the ninety-four colour photographs gathered here, most of them previously unpublished, come from that stretch of work. Marcello Galvani selected them from Guidi’s archive.

The sequence occupies a hinge in Guidi’s development. It follows the irreverent black-and-white snapshots of the early 1970s and precedes the colour investigations he began in the early 1980s with an 8×10 large-format camera. Read along that arc, these pictures are neither apprentice work nor a detour; they show a photographer working out at speed what he would later pursue slowly.

What holds the attention is the subject as much as the method: vernacular buildings, ordinary people, and the visual accidents a moving eye catches. Guidi’s pace is quick and peripatetic, and the photographs question whether the flux of experience can be held at all, and what photographic time might mean when the camera is always passing through. The Italian title, variously rendered as “incidentally”, “by the way” or “among other things”, is Guidi’s own description of these as passing observations and a way of making contact with the world outside.

MACK publishes the book in a bilingual English and Italian edition of 128 pages, hardcover with a tipped-in image, at 22 x 27 cm, a format suited to the intimacy of the small-camera source material. For collectors following Guidi’s colour work, this is where its terms first become legible: a body of images that clarifies how the large-format pictures came to be, and that stands on its own as an account of looking while in motion.