In *In Veneto, 1984–89*, Guido Guidi photographs a central Italian landscape undergoing a quiet but far-reaching transformation. Made between 1984 and 1989 in the provinces of Treviso, Vicenza, Padua, and Venice, the work focuses on places where a once-rural territory has become fragmented by urban spread. Rather than treating the region as a picturesque remnant or a clearly bounded subject, Guidi attends to its uncertain margins: roads, buildings, open ground, and signs of settlement that seem to belong to one continuous, unsettled drawing.

The book opens with a large eye framed by the blind of a shop window in Mestre. Its appearance is both literal and emblematic, suggesting an alertness at the foundation of photography itself. The image establishes a mode of looking that is observant without being declarative. Across the sequence, familiar locations are rendered strange through their adjacency and recurrence, as if geography were being registered alongside the human histories and metaphors embedded in ordinary space.

These photographs were made with a Deardorff 8×10, the first time Guidi used a large-format camera for an entire project. That choice gives the work a particular methodological importance: the camera’s scale and deliberation meet a landscape defined not by monumental events but by incremental change. The resulting photographs do not impose a hierarchy on the territory. Instead, they allow marginal and commonplace places to hold equal attention, revealing the social consequences of development through patient description.

Published by MACK in 2019, this 64-page hardcover brings together previously unpublished photographs from the project. It merits serious attention for the way it joins technical experiment, sustained regional observation, and an understated account of Italy’s changing rural-urban edge. The sequence’s strength lies in its refusal of spectacle: it asks the collector to consider how a place is altered, remembered, and interpreted through photographs that remain open to geography, biography, and metaphor.