Alejandro Merizalde first photographed Venice in 2008 and found the city close to unworkable: too crowded to see. A winter visit helped alter his method. A short winter stay, overcast and fog-bound, thinned the crowds and let the architecture read again — the condition from which VENEZIA, published by 5 Continents Editions, eventually grew.

From 2013 he worked with extended exposures, a gradual shift that quieted the movement of people in the frame and returned attention to structure. It also settled what he had lost interest in. Saint Mark’s Basilica, the Bridge of Sighs, the gondola: the predictable subjects were set aside. The photographs move instead toward the lagoon and toward the quarters where Venetians actually spend their days, so the city appears as a place in use rather than a backdrop.

The book is a hardback of 120 pages at 28 × 28 cm, with texts in English, Italian and French. Luis Pérez-Oramas contributes the accompanying writing. A poet and art historian, he took a doctorate at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1994 and served as curator of Latin American art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 2003 to 2017. His involvement suggests a book concerned with how a city is pictured, not only with how it looks.

Collectors might place the volume within a longer argument. Merizalde, born in Ecuador in 1979, has spent sixteen years on Venice: 100 Churches of Venice and the Lagoon appeared in 2021, and Thirteen Venetian Gasoline Stations, conceived as a tribute to Ed Ruscha, in 2023. Seen together, the three titles show a photographer who keeps testing and re-framing the same city rather than illustrating it. VENEZIA is the point at which the crowds are subtracted and the working city is allowed to stand still.