construction, construction, construction!

Around every corner there seems to be some sort of construction project going on. Venice is very quiet(no cars!), and so I have started listening out for the sounds of wheelbarrows and hand tools.

At first, as a photography project, It seemed sort of funny- all of the these mysterious, wrapped buildings, all of these narrow dark passages made more so with scaffolds and temporary partitions.

The whole city looks like a number of contemporary artists had been invited to do large scale interventions and installations: Christo, Donald Judd, Alice Aycock, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, their spirits float around the winding walkways and canals. the interventions are a study in abrupt and often colorful contrasts, but are oddly difficult to capture as still images. It is a temporal experience, a participation between the viewer moving through the altered spaces, which cannot be really put into a single image.

much of this happens on narrow as-can-be streets, which are darker and more muffled by their swaths and scaffolds which then open up onto the momentary openness and brightness of a piazza or canal. Cameras, particularly digital ones, don't work well with such contrasts.

There are other aspects that have started to intrigue me as well- the massiveness of the project, of Venice itself, trying to keep it aloft, afloat. All of this is being done by men with wheelbarrows and boats, doggedly trundling in materials, and out debris.

They are everywhere, digging up paving stones, dredging canals, adding new posts or endlessly pointing crumbling brick.

What is odd is the way that this all happens amid throngs of tourists, gondolas, palazzos and mask stores. And the tourists are endlessly snapping pictures, apparently oblivious to the work going on around them , and which will inevitably appear in their photos...

This is the one subject I've found here that I don't actually mind photographing. There are SO MANY people here with cameras that it becomes oppressive. Many shops have signs in the window saying"no photo" which at first seemed absurd to me. How could they control it? and how scrooge-ish, not to want to give something away like that, but now I understand. every bridge, corner, turn, has someone, oblivious to others around them snapping away. I hope that the city does not disappear....