Venice is blessed and cursed by its beauty.
Piazza San Marco, the Grand Canal, Rialto Bridge - these iconic monuments draw 20+ million people annually. Throngs of tourists sustain Venice, but they also devour it; crowding out and obscuring the roughly 50,000 residents who still call the lagoon home.
As the 2nd wave of COVID-19 swept across Italy, I returned to Venice to find a place I had never known. In the vacuum left behind by tourism, the Venetians themselves were emerging. I found them not just in the narrow back lanes known to locals, but out in the main squares, drinking, joking, kissing, and really inhabiting their city for the first time in years.
As the rest of the world closed for the winter, shutters in Venice were finally thrust open. What drew me to this project was a rare chance to cast light on the citizens of Venice. The photos, flecked with the ubiquitous markers of a global pandemic, capture otherwise ordinary moments in any Italian town. But in a city notorious for its iconic vistas, these images try to center Venice’s often overlooked subject: the Venetians themselves
