Venezia : Beyond the Icon

Dreamlike black and white photographs capture the mysterious beauty of this beloved city as it is without tourists and beyond the usual places.

Alejandro Merizalde began photographing in Venice in 2008. In his early visits he found the city stiflingly overcrowded, but during a brief winter trip a few years later, the overcast skies and foggy atmosphere allowed him to draw out Venice's legendary beauty without the disruptions of mass tourism.
In 2013 he started experimenting with longer exposures to eliminate the distractions of human activity and enable him to concentrate on his architectural compositions. This shift in approach was gradual, but it helped him realize that he was no longer interested in recording iconic features like St Mark’s Basilica, the Bridge of Sighs and the gondola, to name a few. From then on, he dropped the predictable locations and buildings and trained his lens on the Venice lagoon and areas of the city where Venetians actually spend their lives.

Text in English, French and Italian.

Alejandro Merizalde was born in Ecuador in 1979 and has spent 16 years developing his wide-ranging Venice photographic project. His first book, 100 Churches of Venice and the Lagoon, was published by Damiani in 2021. His second title, Thirteen Venetian Gasoline Stations, a limited-edition art book conceived in tribute to artist Ed Ruscha, was published in 2023. He currently lives and works in Connecticut with his wife.

Luis Pérez-Oramas was born in Caracas in 1960. He is a poet and art historian, holding a PhD in Art History from the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1994). He was the curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 2003 to 2017, and is the author of several exhibition catalogues, essays on art, social issues and political criticism, as well as nine books of poetry.