Guido Guidi: A casa
Guest appearance John Gossage
28 Nov 2025 — 28 Feb 2026A casa is a collection of work that focuses on the famed Italian photographer's home in Ronta, near Cesena. Purchased by Guidi’s father in the 1950s, this house is both a living space and a studio, as well as a meeting place for emerging artists – a space where personal memories and artistic process intertwine, and where his extensive archive is housed.
Fellow artist and bookmaker John Gossage has been a long time friend of Guidi’s. The two have been on many photographic journeys together and for A casa, he has made a small sequence of six books, acknowledging the gift of friendship, featuring photographs taken on visits to Guidi’s house, a homage to an esteemed artist.
Journalist Bartolomeo Sala travelled to Guido Guidi’s home to ask him about this place, the long time setting for his life as well as his approach to photography. An excerpt of their conversation here:
BS In one of your interviews, I read a sentence of yours that felt particularly revealing, “geography is biography.”
For anyone who grew up around here, your house and the landscape that surrounds it are synonymous with the Padan Plain – the sort of third landscape between urban and rural that you and Ghirri first put on the map in Viaggio in Italia. How much did this landscape have an influence on your sensibility and way of photographing?
GG A lot, it influenced me a lot. If you look at certain things, you train your eye on them, then obviously they become [your subject]. Merleau-Ponty used to say, “if you look at a stone, you become the stone.” If you look at certain rocks, they somehow become part of your mental make-up, so you are drawn to observe them again. If you live somewhere else – say, Milan – maybe, there are stones there, too. But there are mostly shop windows, so you spend your days shooting shop windows. You are yourself a shop window, you have digested it and made it your own, so to speak.
Guido Guidi (b. 1941, Cesena) is one of Italy’s most respected photographers, with a career spanning more than five decades. He has mostly focused his lens on rural and suburban geographies close to his home. Guidi has produced over 30 monographs to date, including the recently published ‘Col tempo, 1956–2024’ (MACK), accompanying a comprehensive retrospective currently touring Europe, from the MAXXI, Rome to LE BAL, Paris. Guidi’s photographs are part of International public collections, including the Victoria and AlbertMuseum, London; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondazione SandrettoRe Rebaudengo, Turin and ICCD in Rome; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal and San FranciscoMuseum of Modern Art.
John Gossage (b. 1946, Staten Island, New York, USA) lives and works in Washington, D.C. Gossage is known for his nuanced studies of urban and peripheral landscapes. Since the 1960s, his work has examined the interplay between architecture, memory, and social space, often through sequences of black-and-white photographs. Gossage’s publications, including The Pond (1985) and Berlin in the Time of the Wall (2004), are regarded as seminal contributions to the photobook form. His work is held in major collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Bartolomeo Sala is an Italian journalist and editor based in London. His writing has appeared in the Financia Times Weekend Magazine, the Sunday Times, and The New Statesman and he is a regular contributor to Jacobin, and the Brooklyn Rail.
Fellow artist and bookmaker John Gossage has been a long time friend of Guidi’s. The two have been on many photographic journeys together and for A casa, he has made a small sequence of six books, acknowledging the gift of friendship, featuring photographs taken on visits to Guidi’s house, a homage to an esteemed artist.
Journalist Bartolomeo Sala travelled to Guido Guidi’s home to ask him about this place, the long time setting for his life as well as his approach to photography. An excerpt of their conversation here:
BS In one of your interviews, I read a sentence of yours that felt particularly revealing, “geography is biography.”
For anyone who grew up around here, your house and the landscape that surrounds it are synonymous with the Padan Plain – the sort of third landscape between urban and rural that you and Ghirri first put on the map in Viaggio in Italia. How much did this landscape have an influence on your sensibility and way of photographing?
GG A lot, it influenced me a lot. If you look at certain things, you train your eye on them, then obviously they become [your subject]. Merleau-Ponty used to say, “if you look at a stone, you become the stone.” If you look at certain rocks, they somehow become part of your mental make-up, so you are drawn to observe them again. If you live somewhere else – say, Milan – maybe, there are stones there, too. But there are mostly shop windows, so you spend your days shooting shop windows. You are yourself a shop window, you have digested it and made it your own, so to speak.
Guido Guidi (b. 1941, Cesena) is one of Italy’s most respected photographers, with a career spanning more than five decades. He has mostly focused his lens on rural and suburban geographies close to his home. Guidi has produced over 30 monographs to date, including the recently published ‘Col tempo, 1956–2024’ (MACK), accompanying a comprehensive retrospective currently touring Europe, from the MAXXI, Rome to LE BAL, Paris. Guidi’s photographs are part of International public collections, including the Victoria and AlbertMuseum, London; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondazione SandrettoRe Rebaudengo, Turin and ICCD in Rome; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal and San FranciscoMuseum of Modern Art.
John Gossage (b. 1946, Staten Island, New York, USA) lives and works in Washington, D.C. Gossage is known for his nuanced studies of urban and peripheral landscapes. Since the 1960s, his work has examined the interplay between architecture, memory, and social space, often through sequences of black-and-white photographs. Gossage’s publications, including The Pond (1985) and Berlin in the Time of the Wall (2004), are regarded as seminal contributions to the photobook form. His work is held in major collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Bartolomeo Sala is an Italian journalist and editor based in London. His writing has appeared in the Financia Times Weekend Magazine, the Sunday Times, and The New Statesman and he is a regular contributor to Jacobin, and the Brooklyn Rail.