AG: Looking at the broader trajectory of Italian photography—and perhaps even beyond that—where would you place Guidi’s work today? In your view, what is his legacy, and what makes it radical in the context of contemporary visual culture?

AR: I’m glad you used the word radical, because when an artist pays close attention to the simplest, most everyday things—as Guidi does—there’s always the risk of their work being read as nostalgic or merely consolatory. But this is something else entirely. Here we are faced with an aesthetic that is indeed poetic, but also austere; contemplative, yet analytical, critical—at times even rough-edged.

There are photographs of his in which we can surrender to a lyrical sense of wonder—but just as many that challenge our expectations of what a “beautiful” image is supposed to be. Immersed as we are in a visual regime that feeds on dopamine, we tend to forget certain things every day: that architecture, like our bodies, is fragile and destined to decay; that objects and spaces inevitably vanish, but in the meantime, we have the chance to care for them; that to observe something with patience, over time, gives us the possibility of truly understanding it.

These are values that Guidi’s work expresses, and which I see increasingly resonating with many artists—emerging and established—not just in photography. On a stylistic level, his influence is undeniable. But more than that, I think his work speaks to a cultural need, even before an aesthetic one: a need that more and more people recognize today—a need to reorder certain priorities, and to resist an attention economy that, because of our chronic lack of it, drives every discourse—political, social, visual—toward excess.

Guidi’s work, instead, invites us to stop for a moment, to fix our gaze on how light enters a room—and in doing so, to realize that, as Ocean Vuong so beautifully wrote, on Earth we’re briefly gorgeous.