Venice all to yourself

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Venice in Solitude

By Albert Ostermaier (text) and Christopher Thomas (photographs); edited by Ira Stehman

Solitude is not something you associate with Venice. Between the Venetian residents and the tourists, ‘bustling’ is more the effect of the damp little city. Christopher Thomas has, however, very systematically taken these pictures late at night or early in the morning with time exposures on his old-fashioned camera with a tripod, using large-frame Polaroid film. Now, suddenly, you have Venice all to yourself. There are deserted squares and quaysides; streetlamps illuminating silent bridges. There is an eerie emptiness in the pictures, as though we are looking at a deserted stage after the audience has gone home.

Christopher Thomas planned his work with great forethought and attention to weather reports, phases of the moon, and lighting effects. The results are like old sepia photographs of a vanished Venice such as those recorded in old monochrome pictures of a century or more ago.  As you look at these pictures of familiar places seemingly more deserted than humanly possible, you can’t help wondering how Thomas managed to avoid a human presence, even if it was at dawn or midnight. Surely there are still people at those hours, either rising early or out on the town?

Although to avoid a human presence in the pictures Thomas was limited in some ways to particular times of the year and the day, the quality of the light varies considerably. There may be a soft misty tone or sharply delineated stone bridges and gondolas. He catches some scenes by bright moonlight and others when the sun is well up in the sky. Café tables with tablecloths wait for customers, but no one has yet appeared. The nighttime exposures show the reflection of streetlights on the glistening squares. Streetlights reflect on the paving stones, making a long bright puddle of light on the seemingly quilted surface of the Campo San Leonardo, and the white walls and Gothic arches of the Teatro Italia reflect on the black pavement, with pale subterranean pilings corresponding to the pilasters between the theatre doors.

The fact of canals in Venice tempts the camera. Christopher Thomas has some striking images in bright moonlight of, for example, the Fondamente dei Mori. Here an ancient stone figure built into the corner of a building arrests the eye on the left of the picture, and the shallow steps of a bridge on the right cascade in from some other scene. The centre of the picture takes us past houses with their windows outlined in white and down a dog-leg in the canal to a tiny dome in the distance.

If it weren’t for the mooring posts, you would sometimes hardly know whether you were looking at the smooth, wet quayside or the smooth, wet canal. But it’s not all fog and shadows and early morning dew. There are pictures such as that of the Rio dell’Arsenale taken from water level through the arch of a bridge. The dark curve of the bridge arch contrasts with the white sides of the stone bridge and the banisters and balustrades above. Framed by the curve is a distant shoreline and campanile. Two pictures of Santa Maria della Salute demonstrate the range of possibilities. One is sharply delineated in (presumably) early morning light, the other is from a different angle on a foggy day, when the ghostly intricacies of the church and the canal side fade from right to left. We see moorings, gothic windows, the massive church, then buildings farther away that grow into the mist so that at the left margin there is only the soft, enveloping fog.

Sometimes parked gondolas are blurred around the edges where they have fidgeted during the long exposure, but the water – whatever its movement might have been – is sharp and sleek. Other pictures are nearly abstract, as in the pattern of lights on pilings in the Canale della Sacche; of gondolas and posts at the Fondamenta della Dogana alla Salute; of posts in the foggy water of Fondamente Nuove.

Albert Ostermaier’s 19 poems, free, allusive, and unpunctuated, are a verbal complement to the photographs. There is often a melancholy, mysterious tone to them; absent lovers are remembered; jilted lovers come to a sad end. Of one mysterious person he writes: ‘let the wind be/the jewellery in her hair/the sun her gold/a necklace of shadows’. The Venetian waters and the words come together when: ‘I glide along the language of the/water where the pages / flutter in the wind…’.

This sumptuous Venice in Solitude finishes with a further dozen pictures of the photographer at work and an afterword by the Venetian Antonio Foscari. Between their elegant covers these photographs are hauntingly evocative of the stones of Venice in atmospheric light and shadow and show the city as we are never likely to see it ourselves.

Venice in Solitude by Albert Ostermaier (text) and Christopher Thomas (photographs), edited by Ira Stehman and translated from the German by Kevin A. Perryman is published by Prestel, 2012. 160 pp. 70 mono illus of Venice plus 12 showing photographer at work. ISBN 978-3-7913-4642-7