A Cityscape Transformed by the Unveiling of a Mountainscape

For many days of the year the Dolomites appear so faintly (if at all) in Venice that they're easily mistaken for distant clouds strung insubstantially along the hazy horizon--just an airy illusion of substance where none actually exists. At least that's what I thought I saw when I first visited Venice. So on those days--typically in the morning following a clamorous storm, or in the clear chill of winter--when they appear completely unveiled it's enough to upend your whole sense of where you thought you stood in the world, and to displace all the mediterranean associations clustered around the name of Venice with new, strange, and invigorating alpine ones. (photo taken: 27 November 2013)

Giambattista Tiepolo in Santi Apostoli

Comunione di Santa Lucia (19 November 2014)

What's At the Rialto Market These Days

The above image--not "styled" for the camera, but taken just as I found it in our kitchen one evening--shows the array of things to be found in the Rialto market as the holidays approach: persimmons, pomegranates, lemons, tangerines, apples, vine-ripened tomatoes, onions, garlic, fresh ginger... With these possibilities at hand I never found myself missing, or even thinking about the American Thanksgiving, as in themselves they were worthy of their own lower-case thanksgiving. I'm dismayed at the thought that some people might visit Venice and buy their fruits and vegetables from one of the city's chain supermarkets. Don't do it! (picture taken: 5 December 2020)

Late Night Reflections of Ca'D'Oro

16 November 2020, 12:20 am: Before the arrival of Covid it would have been rare to see the water of the Grand Canal so still at any hour of the day or night.

Sore Thumb Beside the Rialto Bridge, Designed By Rem Koolhaas's OMA Studio

The Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the second largest historical building in Venice, and most recently the city's central post office, was re-opened on October 1, 2016 as a large duty-free shop oriented toward Asian tourists after a significant re-design by the architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas and his OMA Studio that opened up some interesting perspectives within the old structure (see above). Unfrequented by Venetians, however, and despite its central location right beside the Rialto Bridge, this large building, with its foundations in the 13th century, sticks out (as they say) like a store thumb in what subsists of local life. (photo: 10 November 2016)

Sunset Over the Grand Canal

6 November 2016

 

A Venetian Childhood, South Lagoon

Our son, Sandro, aged 6, piloting our sandolo-sanpierota with an extended tiller (2 November 2014)

Jack (O'Lantern) On the Grand Canal

31 October 2017

Social Connections, Old School and New

10 September 2019

Drawing After School, Behind Scuola Grande di San Rocco

21 October 2014

 

Homeward at Sunset, North Lagoon

29 October 2016

Rio De San Toma

14 October 2014

Morning Fog on the Grand Canal (With Ca'D'Oro and Bandiera)

11 October 2017

Canalside, Murano

20 September 2018

Sun in the Sail, Bacino di San Marco

17 October 2015

Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta, With Swans (Torcello)

29 September 2019

The qualities of the colors in this image (to the extent that they can even be suggested by a photo, which can serve, after all and at best, only as an analogy of the actual scene--as even the finest recording of music offers but a kind of "parallel" and reductive version of actual living music), the chalky or almost pastel look of them as they appear in the autumnal late-afternoon marine light of the lagoon, is one of the things I miss most about Venice. As the old Venetian painters well knew, it's an atmosphere in which color takes precedence, seems more substantial than form, and the interplay of tones is everything. Let the Tuscans worry about drawing, about delineating forms in space and mathematical perspective--in the lagoon it's all a wash.  

 

Setting Up Tables on a Foggy Morning

13 September 2018

Full Moon Over the Grand Canal

12 September 2019

Fishing Nets and Wildflowers, Isola dei Laghi

27 September 2014

Marina di Sant'Elena, Looking Toward Lido at Dusk

18 September 2016

Water Traffic and Repose, Bacino di San Marco

22 September 2016

On the Balcony

28 September 2015

Head Over Heels in the South Lagoon

Vegetation grows thick on the islands of the south lagoon, and there's no telling what might be covered, or nearly covered by it: in this case a trampoline, in this re-discovered image I forgot ever taking (16 April 2017)

Motoring, North Lagoon

1 September 2020

Archeological Dig, Torcello

5 August 2017

Rowing in the South Lagoon (Towards Lido)

1 August 2014

Daydream in Blues and White, Grand Canal

26 August 2017

The Big Sleep

13 August 2016, Padova

Fishing, Sunset, North Lagoon

7 August 2020

Giudecca's Eye View

From one of the three "eyes" of Casa dei Tre Oci, the photography gallery on Giudecca (10 August 2018)

 

Crossing the Rialto Bridge: 11 August 2017, 11:48 am

 

Summer Storm Clearing Over the Grand Canal

The brightest, hottest days of summer can turn abruptly dark and stormy in Venice. Though the storms tend to clear rather quickly, you don't want to get caught in your boat out in the lagoon with the thunder and lightning breaking just over your head--or you'll find that time seems to pass very slowly indeed. (6 August 2017)

 

Pigeon's Eye View, Piazza San Marco

9 July 2017

Evening Pause, Riva dei Sette Martiri

21 June 2015

 

First Flight, Rio Fuseri

27 July 2015

 

Festa del Redentore: From a Boat in the Bacino of San Marco

19 July 2014

Between Sea and Sky

Cityscape from the south lagoon: 14 July 2016

Barena's Edge

Plant life along the edge of a barena in the north lagoon: 4 July 2014

Summer Afternoon on Sant' Elena

6 July 2014

Camogli, 4 July 2015

Festa di San Pietro di Castello, 28 June 2014

Dark Reflections at Dusk on Riva Dei Sette Martiri

21 June 2015

During each Biennale the line of yachts anchored along the Riva dei Sette Martiri a short distance from the traditional seat of the exhibition in the Giardini tends to represent a rogues gallery of international oligarchs: mobsters from around the world, like Russia's Roman Abramovich, who've made a killing (quite literally: see Russia's "Aluminum Wars" of the 1990s) in the kleptocratic privatization of their home country's assets, or monopolists like Microsoft co-fonder Paul Allen. 

The yacht above belongs to the billionaire Les Wexner, founder of the clothing chain The Limited, whose holdings would eventually expand to include Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Bath & Body Works. But Wexner is now most notorious as the man who in the 1980s developed a very close personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, becoming the "main client" of the money management firm of the college drop out, and staking him with the means that would allow the latter to forge ties with American presidents, British royals, and other prominent international power brokers in the construction of what was Epstein's real business: sex trafficking.

What Epstein was selling to men rich enough to buy whatever they wanted with impunity, was indeed the idea of life without any limits, a life lived well beyond the reach of national or international law. 

It also seemed to me at the time I took this image to be one of the primary strains of American thought: this fantasy--decidedly infantile in nature--of a world without any kind of constraints, or restraint. You know the words and the associated myth: "liberty," "freedom," so vague as to be meaningless, and often used as justification for all kinds of abuses and violence. At the very least, with a kind of sociopathic selfishness.  

In the summer of 2015 the grotesque embodiment of this infantile, sociopathological strain in American thought was running for president. He was not an anomaly then, he is not one now. Nor are his followers, nor the party which he heads, which is now overtly fascist, with its threats of violence, its openly anti-democratic aspirations, its aim to destroy all sense and reason in public discourse, its substitution of histrionic self-pitying displays of grievance for any actual policy proposals or interest in governance, its aim of destroying the state with its admittedly imperfect checks and balances with a one-party rule of limitless power... 

Limitless corruption, limitless oppression, limitless exploitation: this is the promise of those who are euphemistically called "nationalists" or "populists" (though they are inevitably in the pocket of corporate interests and promoting a ruling party whose rules are essentially written by corporations). 

There's an irony in seeing nations such as England and the US once accused of the crimes of colonialism turning the brutal practices of colonialism upon their own citizens in their home countries: for example, one no longer needs to live in the Niger Delta to be subjected to a poisoned water supply, it's common throughout the US, and one need not live in a Native American reservation to be subjected to sub-par schools, medical access, and infrastructure.

The limitless, unbounded proliferation of cells in the body is known as cancer. In the body politic the fantasy of limitlessness is no less cancerous and no less deadly.

Boyfriend Duty 3

16 February 2020

Boyfriend Duty 2

4 September 2017

Boyfriend Duty 1

19 January 2022

When I look at random through old files that I haven't yet posted sometimes a theme or two seem to emerge: one such theme serves as the subject of this and the next couple of posts. 

Of course it's not only women who serve as the photographic subjects for their significant others (or, in the case of what's called "Instagram Boyfriends", compel their boyfriends to capture them for their social media accounts), but it seems from what I've witnessed that when males compel their female partners to capture them the situation is rarely so picturesque--not least of all, because males often like to be photographed "in action." 

Like the time my son and I had to wait to cross a small bridge in San Polo while an American male in his 20s clambered onto the small bridge's low concrete parapet and, after making sure his girlfriend was prepared with the camera, leapt down to be caught in mid-air.  

It was the kind of leap my son used to like to make off an unused outdoor stage in Lido into the sand below when he was 4 years old. It never occurred to him either at that age, or at any point afterwards, that it was something one might do in the city of Venice. (Nor did it occur to him at the age of four to ask us to photograph him in flight.) 

But one thing I noticed in more than a decade of living full-time in Venice is that it seems that the beauty of the city, and all the signs of its long history, are simply too much for some visitors to bear. Perhaps feeling insignificant in comparison to so much culture and history--and apparently without an educational or auto-didactical history that would allow them to make any sense of it--they assert themselves through sheer physicality.   

Grand Canal: Green and Orange

11 January 2018

Grand Canal: Blue and Orange

27 June 2017

Vaporetto Portrait

30 May 2013

At The Easel

17 September 2017

Nature Calls, Campo Sant'Angelo

Dressed to kill? Nope, to scoop (poop). 1 June 2018