Venice Views

Venezia, #50, Italia, 2023

“Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.”

– Jerry Saltz

What is this place, anyway?

A combination of Disneyland and a multi-hundred year-old open-air museum…?

An endangered city threatened by global warming, pollution, and sea level rise…?

A former mediterranean empire and center of old world international trade…?

A focal point of the international art scene…?

A collection of swampy islands hosting an array of crumbling buildings…?

A wild and crazy and a still-marginally-authentic place to experience Carnival…?

The epicenter of the romantic universe for those deep in the blinding throes of love…?

A floating mall…?

All of the above???

Recommendations

Go there, it is indeed an amazing place. But…

Do NOT go there during peak tourist season.

Go in January or February and dress warmly.

Stroll randomly.

Be respectful. Behave yourself.

Learn and use the “water bus” system (the vaporettos).

Photography

This place has been photographed so much… how does one “see” it and photograph it in a way that might be different?

The good news is that we all are unique individuals, each with a unique perspective on “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything” (42!). Therefore, how we see the world, through our hairy eyeballs, will very necessarily be different from how others may see it. So, if one can filter out the outside photographic influences and just go with what sprouts from within, it is definitely possible to make images that are different from any that have gone before.

This is called “vision” and we each have one that is unique to us. Good news!

The images

I don’t know if these images qualify as my “vision” of how I saw Venice… but it was fun to play around a bit with something other than my usual monochrome style.