I date the beginning of my project to 2008, even though I hardly made any images that year. My stay during that late summer was brief and frustrating: too many people and too much noise. When I committed seriously to the task of photographing Venice, two years had passed. I went back in a late winter to attend an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci at the breathtaking Accademia, and in that short, three-day stay I felt that the rainy weather and off-tourism season were conditions far more ideal to what I had in mind for capturing in my work. So I began photographing some of Venice’s most notable buildings, structures and historical areas; slowly diverting my lens to locations less transited by visitors. This body of work spanned to 2019 and employed the use of long exposure photography, a process that allowed me to eliminate passersby and moving boats in order to present the urban landscape undisturbed. Through time, however, I begun to lose a little bit of heart. It didn’t happen overnight but, after so many years working and living in Venice, I realized that those icons—the Basilica of San Marco, the Bridge of Sighs, the Gondola, and the Rialto Bridge, to name a few—no longer resonated or aligned with what I was looking for in terms of developing a project. Despite their colossal beauty I decided to archive those images. The more I walked the edges of Venice and traveled to its surrounding islands, the more I fell in love with what I consider to be Venice’s truest icon: the Venetian lagoon. And after well over a decade photographing in Venice, what I’m offering are images of areas untouched by tourism and landscapes unique to the fragile ecosystem of the lagoon. Areas that represent the roots and livelihoods of Venetians and thus should remain protected and undisturbed. I’ve been called audacious and a fool for choosing to make a book about Venice that has almost nothing of what’s typically associated with the city. But there is indeed more to Venice than those iconic buildings and structures we’ve seen reproduced since time immemorial across every significant medium. The photographs in this book are my attempt at broadening the view.

Alejandro Merizalde was born in South America and currently lives and works in Connecticut. He’s received the Emily Harvey Foundation Residency twice, allowing him to live and work in Venice for extended periods of time. His photographs have appeared in publications and websites such as National Geographic and Black & White Photography Magazine.

For photographs of his travels through Europe and the United States click here

For a look at his project during the pandemic lockdown click here