Visual Memories and Water Surfaces: The Photographer’s Eye in Venice

The history of photography in Venice, above all in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, is one of the most exiting in the world, with a list of protagonists who promoted the visual knowledge of the lagoon and its floating city in particular its monumental art, landscape, genre scenes – including unique pictures – often offering exceptional dreamlike images thanks to the reflective water surfaces. The paper will explore the ephemeral photographer’s eyethat matured, both artistically and technologically, with sophisticated techniques of observation. Focusing on many artists that recorded a transforming water city, the paper aims to evoke the responsive heirs of a tradition of images which found in Venice a particularly fertile place for the promotion of photography as culture and communication.