New photography book showcases hidden Venice
VenicExposed cover
Photo: Contrasto
Who can show off Venice better than a Venetian? Venice born Luca Campigotto presents an insightful nighttime vision of the Venetian lagoon in a new photographic book featuring 65 black and white photographs due out this summer.
In the 120-page book titled VenicExposed (Contrasto, $50) he juxtaposes familiar tourist images of Venice with a noirish perception of the Marghera zone, an industrial district of docks and commerce rarely visited by outsiders. The photos showcase a quiet Venice tourists rarely see because of the locations and the time of night. The result is dreamlike and realistic at the same time. It invites the viewer to visit or revisit Venice in search of these black and white night visions.
“I believe that my images want to speak of places without time, or where time has stopped. Perhaps, a desperate and almost unconscious attempt to take possession of eras in which it was not possible to live. If you look at the photographs, especially the souvenir pictures, basically it is just this that happens: we look at things and persons that we cannot get back. I believe that photography is the supreme tool of nostalgia.”
Campigotto, known in Italy for his landscape photography, treats landscapes as theatre sets. He began his career by dedicating himself to social photographic essays and landscape photography. His work, exhibited in Italy and abroad, is part of private and public collections.
