Venice: Work In Progress

Venice is a dream, a city that can’t possibly be real. Yet each visit offers a glimpse into a multilayered past that is at once utterly romantic, thrilling in a manner unlike anyplace else on Earth. It is a contradiction in terms: a republic of nobles, a conquering, swashbuckling, seafaring locus of… merchants whose patronage of the arts created Florence’s only competition. And it has lapsed, since Napoleon, into luxurious desuetude and gritty backstreets far from the tourists’ well-trod haunts. My first visit wasn’t until I was old enough to be a Doge, and now I want to make up for lost time. The images here were made during two ultimately very short visits, five days of shooting. I was able to plunk down near Rialto, and later in Dorsoduro, and prowl manically from Cannareggio to San Giorgio Maggiore with a Leica in hand. I had this overwhelming urge to document what my eyes saw even as my jaw dropped. Which of us will disappear first, I must have been thinking — the precarious canal city in the midst of a lagoon, or me? That tension keeps me going, and will keep me returning — and I hope is reflected in these images.