Venice, 2024
The idea that a city is increasingly viewed and less and less lived in is paradoxical, but this is also what Venice is. It exists in two dimensions: the city that empties and its image that multiplies. One contracts, the other expands, and yet they are one and the same.
I chose not to photograph Venice, but those who pass through it.
Bodies captured close up, from behind, statuesque, sometimes without context because that was where what I wanted to see was. No faces; anyone could have been there, and anyone would have become the same thing.
There is something strange about the way we move through the places we love. We want the feeling of having been there. People come to Venice because they love it, because it is beautiful, because they want to see it for the first time, even if this were to be the last. The problem, then, is not indifference, but the system within which we move, the form our relationship with beautiful things has taken, which has reduced the way we relate to these places to something fleeting, consumable, and replicable.
This project seeks a perspective: to see what we tend not to look at, to recognise that presence, in certain places, is already a form of absence.