Verso Nord documents a shared commission undertaken in 2019 in and around Castelfranco, in the Veneto, when Guido Guidi and Gerry Johansson each turned their cameras on the same stretch of northeastern Italy. The book, published by Hartmann Books in 2021 and edited by Stefania Rössl and Massimo Sordi, sets two distinct temperaments side by side rather than blending them. Guidi works the historic centre with an 8×10 inch large-format camera, attending to architectural surfaces and the slow accumulation of history; Johansson roams the dispersed, unplanned edges of the town in black-and-white, gathering fragments of a landscape that hovers between the ordinary and the strange. Neither approach illustrates the other. Together they describe a place through two incompatible but adjacent ways of seeing.
The commission grew out of the P=S+N project, and the resulting exhibition appeared at the OMNE Festival in Castelfranco in autumn 2021. Rössl’s contribution takes the form of a conversation with both photographers, so the book carries its own account of how the work was made. The volume presents its texts in Italian and English, and the publisher treats the object itself as a piece of regional craft: a three-part hardcover holding two fold-out Swiss brochures, with blind and colour embossing, designed by Damiano Fraccaro and produced with Grafiche Antiga. The seventy-nine illustrations move between colour, duotone and black-and-white across two sections of forty-eight pages each.
For a collector, the interest lies less in any claim of scarcity than in the nature of the collaboration. Two photographers with long, separate bodies of work were asked to respond to one territory, and the book’s structure preserves that division instead of resolving it. The sequencing, the shift in palette between sections, and the physical layering of the binding all reinforce the sense of a place examined twice. It is a considered record of a specific commission, and it rewards the kind of slow reading that the photographs themselves seem to ask for.
