As the decades turned, photographers continued to visualise the city – from Tomaso Filippi’s late-19th century pictures of Venice to Fulvio Roiter’s best-selling photobook Essere Venezia, published in 1978. Four years later, he returned with his own camera, producing his three-volume study of Venetian architecture, The Stones of Venice. Venice is where, in 1845, writer John Ruskin discovered the miracle of the daguerreotype. “Immersed between sky and water,” is how artist Lorenzo Vitturi describes the city.Īs for photography’s story, it is a tale of fantasy and riches. I was struck by the trompe l’oeil of the Venice architecture, the warmth of its light and the poetry of its details. Standing beneath Bellini’s San Zaccaria Altarpiece, I awoke to the transportive power of images. The place exuded a gentle glow, and I immediately fell under its spell. As a child, my first visit coincided with the tail end of the Biennale at a time before I fully understood its significance. The peach sky on a dawn lagoon, the slate grey of winter fog, the carmine red of Titian satin, and the rainbow treasure of Murano’s workshops. Venice is – to borrow a phrase from writer Patrick Leigh Fermor – where I first encountered “rafts of colour”. Louise Long looks beyond the touristic sites and bustle of the Biennale to uncover Venice’s photographic highlights The azure lagoons and golden light of Italy’s floating city have charmed visitors for centuries.
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