I love Italian

I Get the Aisle

Venice

I'm heading to Venice in February. I've been thinking about it for months. Not the logistics, though those exist, but what I'm actually trying to do there. What I'm trying to see and make.

I know what I'm not doing. I'm not documenting it. No one needs another golden-hour shot of the Rialto, another gondola reflection, another mask in a shop window. That Venice has been photographed into meaninglessness. What I'm after is harder to name. Something less Disney and more Dumas.

The city works on me. The light on the water at dawn, the colors that exist nowhere else, the weight of centuries pressing down on stone. Breathtakingly beautiful and casually brutal. When I look at those buildings, I wonder what it cost to build them. And I don't mean ducats.

ICM feels right. The blur pulls the past forward somehow. It helps me imagine the city as it was.

I'll be shooting the empty city. Dawn, blue hour, midnight. The edges of day when the tourists disappear and something older becomes accessible. Not the Venice we've learned to see.