Walter Guadagnini's 'Fotografia' Surveys Two Centuries of Photography

Walter Guadagnini's book 'Fotografia. Due secoli di storia e immagini' (Skira, 2022) offers a non-chronological journey through photography from pioneers Niépce, Fox Talbot, and Nadar to contemporary digital works by Andreas Gursky. The volume, co-published by Skira and Gallerie d'Italia, is structured in sixteen chapters and includes a tripartite photo album. Guadagnini acknowledges the impossibility of being exhaustive, instead presenting a series of reading proposals that privilege ideas over names. The book spans international contexts beyond the Western canon, covering both black-and-white and color images, and addresses the impact of digital technology on photography's popularity in the last thirty years.