The Collateral Eye

Guido Fuà has done nothing but collect a rich and diverse series of such 'sidelong glances,' as he himself has called them. This constant gathering of instants shares one common trait: each asserts itself as an unforeseen truth, replacing the predictable and rhetorical one the photographer had been hired to construct. Moments when the gaze takes a holiday — distracted and refreshed, unfocused and amused, abstracted and sinking into thought. Fuà offers us a tight, rigorously constructed itinerary in the form of a sidelong narrative, through which the viewer fixes the image in their mind, free to observe and ponder it against the virtual backdrop of an official photograph that, for once, is entirely invisible.

— Augusto Pieroni, photography critic and author of books on aesthetics

The idea of gathering images under the title 'Sidelong Glances' was born from a repeated and tested separation between photography as a profession and photography experienced as a tool for creative expression. A crowded schedule of commissioned photographic work can impose obligations and limitations — binding aesthetic standards and descriptive demands sometimes foreign to one's own inclinations. The sidelong glance is the gaze directed, by chance or destiny, away from the focused subject; a gaze that, with a sudden turn of the neck, catches an incongruous and irrelevant detail outside our field of vision. The fourteen surreal, ironic, dramatic, mediated, constructed images — or those caught in their immediacy — form a collection of disparate fragments. Their only bond is that each springs from a rebellious impulse of vision, one that diverts the eye from the scene of professional routine and formal obligation, and out of pure creative impulse directs attention sideways toward an unexpected, co-present subject, entirely or nearly detached from professional concerns. A gesture of expressive freedom, seeking depth and substance in a world where the mechanisms of seeing sometimes appear hastily directed and focused within narrow, superficial limits.

— Guido Fuà, photographer and graduate in visual anthropology