Venice in the night – Michelle Lovric

All my best moments in Venice have been in the dark, on the water.

I can never get enough of those journeys down back canals in small boats by night, when the city offers her most intimate, most secret and magical hours.

My nights afloat on Venice’s liquid streets always find their way into my novels. They graft themselves to plot-lines, be they scenes of adventure in a children’s book or consummations of passion in novels for adults: sometimes, it seems to me as if Venice has two nights – one for terror and one for love.

Apart from the personal pleasure these journeys give me, I know that they are catnip for my writing. That’s because everything is intensified at night in Venice. For a start, there are fewer packs of tourists to clutter up and dilute the lines of the architecture.

By night, fewer rattling suitcases drown out the tentative and delicate sounds of the water. The tiny real noises of Venice start to make themselves heard … cicadas obsessing in hidden gardens, a rat tugging a lettuce leaf across paving stones, a lone violinist dragging his bow across his instrument at an unseen window. The palaces seem to bend down solicitously, offering their ornaments to view. Architectural patterns, softly illuminated, are suddenly picked out in lyrical clarity.

It’s also at night that Venice’s beauty can most easily become a metaphor for all kinds of things, including interior ugliness, corruption and a looming kind of fear.

In my forthcoming children’s novel, The Wishing Bones, four young people make a journey that combines the two: an after-midnight boat trip through a silent city, drained of colour, during which a young Casanova plays a violin strung with mermaid hair, while gazing into the eyes of the saddest girl I’ve ever written, Sorrowful Lily.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of meeting David Winston, a photographer who makes the night in Venice emotionally legible in almost the same way that I, as a writer, attempt to do. I have walked around Venice with David in brilliant sun and impenetrable mist, shadowing his photography with my notebook, and I’ve loved seeing how he thinks. It soon became clear to me that what I render in words, he renders on paper with chemicals and an artist’s eye. This post is illustrated with pictures from his Nocturnes series.

I showed David’s Nocturnes to a Venetian friend who teaches photography. More than that, this is the same friend who has lately given me the pleasure of night trips around the small canals late at night. He agreed that David’s pictures truly capture that otherworldly experience of the city. ‘Emerge una sensibilità sapiente,’ he said. ‘What comes through is a knowing sensitivity’.

David has kindly allowed me to ask him some questions about how he came to create his Nocturnes.

First of all, you have a completely separate career as a restorer of antique pianos. So how is that you came to spend so much time in Venice?

Just over two years ago I had been through some very big changes in my life. I had been to Venice for Carnevale the previous year, but then I was not alone, so didn’t take the time to get to the heart of the place. When I did go back, through a bit of serendipity, I stayed in the Hotel Ca’ Pisani, near Zattere. I noticed that they had an exhibition in the upstairs foyer. I got into conversation with the owner, Marianna, and asked if she would be interested in exhibiting some of my photographs. She said she’d take a look at my site. After a very short time she came back with a very positive ‘Si’. In preparation for the exhibition, I kept returning to Venice and each time it drew me in a bit more. Eventually it just made sense to rent someplace. Now I spend just under half my time here.

So this change in your circumstances left you free to ask the question, ‘What do I actually want to do now?’ instead of the usual ‘What do I have to next?’ The answer turned out to be, it seems, ‘creating painterly photographs of Venice’?

Yes, I try to come up with an answer to what draws those of us to Venice who want to make it a home. I think, hopefully without sounding too ‘pseudo’, that it is the pursuit of beauty. For me, beauty is somehow evidence of the divine and that is a very human pursuit.

What is it about the night in Venice that draws you?

Venice is a city of mystery – and mystery may choose to hide behind a veil, whether it is a veil of darkness or a veil of mist. When that veil becomes permeable – that’s when the essential character of the place reveals itself. Walking the canals at night you can literally hear the city breathing as the water flows through the veins of the city. You start to understand things …

Venice is a wily mistress. During the day, when the city is overrun by the selfie-taking admirers who trample through her beauty without really asking, she pulls into herself. So it is hard to keep her in your sights unless you can keep the memory of her nights in your head.

I notice that you observe the courtesy of personifying Venice as a woman …

Yes. And if you want to take a picture of a beautiful woman, you do her the courtesy of engaging her in conversation. You have the humility to learn something about her. And you don’t insult her by taking her photo where she is only the backdrop. This mistress knows her beauty. As the sun goes down, she breathes a sigh of relief and you literally feel the city reveal and become herself again as the night draws in. You wrote in one of your books how in the fog ‘Venice deconstructs herself’. That really made me sit up, because it so captured my own feeling about the place. What happens is that, through this deconstruction, you see again the essential elements.

I think that was The Floating Book, which opens in fog and disarray. Venice is notably more ‘of the night’ than most modern cities, isn’t she? Her lighting is dimmer and her darkness is therefore blacker? And her mysteries more profound – and intriguing?

A wonderful thing about Venice is how the lighting is not an all-purpose flooding of the shadows. Instead, everywhere you see a single light over a door, not there to generously light the way of passers-by, but simply to light the doorway for the inhabitants. Late at night, I wander the calle in search of shadowy doorways and colonnades that are full of mystery, revealing little of what is behind them—not only who lives there now, but who lived there before.

Where does that colonnade lead? Do the colonnades invite us to explore further, or do they instil fear of what lurks there? I suppose that, in a way, with my nocturnes what I’m trying to do is also deconstruct and to reveal simply a mood that then must engage our imagination. As a musician, I have always been drawn to the musical form of the nocturne, which is after all much the same idea – music that’s just a suggestion, infused with only sufficient light to reveal its form. Then our imagination has to fill in the rest.

What kinds of stories are you trying to tell?

I want to show my very personal admiration for the dark beauty of this improbable city. I go hunting at night for my images. It is a very emotional process. For me it is a city of full of ghosts and with my Nocturnes I am trying to show where they emerge from the darkness.   

How do you ‘paint the light’ into the raw photographs? Your use of light seems positively editorial.

I actually try to start with a raw image where the light seems to be changing – on the way from light to darkness. So, rather than a static, frozen moment in time, it is capturing the sense of change.

Your photographs rarely remain untouched after they’ve been taken. Because capturing the image is only half of the story, isn’t it? Back in the darkroom, you transform your photographs using the techniques of Gum Bichromate, Cyanotype, Platinum/Palladium, Chlorophyll Print. Why do you use such old-fashioned techniques to re-render them?

Modern photo processes are too exact and do not leave enough to the imagination. Photographs are more often than not simply just used to say ‘I wuz 'ere’… rather than as an expression of emotion. Current processes are more adapted to this simple need. The unpredictability, the happy accidents of the early processes produce a more human, personal result.

I use many different processes in producing my final images. The camera can be an indifferent, objective observer and our brain plays tricks. How often have you taken a photo, only to see later that it was ruined by something in the corner of the picture that you did not notice when you took it? That is because the camera does not have the human filter, which is really the essence of artistic expression. Photography has become more and more sophisticated and at the same time, to me, a disturbingly undervalued form. It can be too easy and the magic is lost. I was looking for a way to produce a photograph which shows what I see - where the machine of the camera is less dominant. I can intervene in the process and produce an image that shows more accurately what I see in my head when I press the shutter.

Most of the processes I use go back to the earliest days of photography in the mid-19th century, although some are also modern techniques I’ve developed along the way. So it can be very bewildering to people when I try to explain what is involved. Essentially, one must start with a blank sheet of watercolour paper and apply various photosensitive chemicals to the paper with a brush. Everything matters and changes the result: how you brush on the chemicals, what kind of brush you use, what type of paper, humidity and of course which chemicals.

I get so excited about all the different possibilities…. in a modern take on the Renaissance use of gold leaf in painting, I have also experimented a lot with printing on thin tissue and then adding gold and silver leaf to the back of an image.

I am happy to use digital techniques where they add to the palette, but again, never in a conventional way. I find that so much digitally-produced photographic work can appear overworked and be totally soulless, so I must leave something to chance in the way I use it. Recently I have been working a lot with multiple exposures created in camera, layering one image over the other. One can get some startling surprises and juxtapositions. I’ve been producing a whole series called ‘Venice Multiplied’. Interestingly, by layering one essential aspect of the Venetian landscape over another, this technique effectively ‘deconstructs’ the city and emphasises a single element in an often fantastical dream world, which is of course what the place is.

Of all the different processes, which are best adapted for telling Venetian stories?

I would say probably the Gum Bichromate process. There are so many ways to build up layers using different pigments and density. It really is a cross between photography and painting. I want my photographs to be stories and stories are, after all, made up of layers.

In this process, watercolour pigments are mixed with light sensitive chemicals and the image is built up in many stages: you must have a different negative for each colour value: red, blue and yellow. The density of the image slowly comes together after as much as 25 different exposures, one over the other. There is a tremendous opportunity to change the final image depending on which pigments you use, obviously.

Then, there is the opportunity to combine different processes, which multiplies the available palette ten-fold. I especially like starting with an image printed in the Prussian Blue of the cyanotype process, then overlaying with several passes of Indigo or Lampblack, which adds wonderful depth to the shadows and renders a beautiful translucent lapis lazuli colour.

Can you give examples of picture with each process?

Of course!

Chlorophyll print

Multiple Exposure

Platinum/Palladium

Cyanotype

Gum Bichromate over Cyanotype

Print on tissue backed with gold and silver leaf

Usually you go out alone foraging for stories, as I do. Are you ever frightened in Venice at night? (I admit that I am)

Every once in a while, I think I should be, but I never really ever am …

Are you exhibiting in the UK any time soon? Where?

Yes, I am. From 4-7 April I will be exhibiting my work at Roy’s People Art Fair, at Bargehouse in London, which is near the OXO Tower. It is a really interesting artist-led show with a wide mix of artists.

Thank you, David, for your time and your patience.  

David Winston’s website
Michelle Lovric’s website
The Wishing Bones is published on July 25th, 2019
Michelle is teaching a pair of Masterclasses called FLOW in London in March and April with Lucy Coats. For more details see here

Beneath the Divan: A Family Album by Debra Daley

The oldest, the most historical item that I own is a photograph album that was probably made sometime between 1865 and the 1880s. It’s an object that is significant to me, not only as a family keepsake, but because it has served in a way as an ongoing history lesson ever since it came into my hands when I was a child. It has prompted me to ask questions about provenance and image-making and to undertake research to answer those questions. It represents my first conscious encounter with the past.

My maternal grandparents lived in a small, two-bedroom house in a suburb of Auckland, where they had managed to raise five children on a factory-worker’s wages. A dark mood tended to prevail in my own home, where scarcity and trouble ruled the roost, but my grandparents were social and talkative and encouraging. I loved coming to stay with them in the school holidays. Even the situation of their house, at the top of a rise – and the name of the street itself, Jubilee Avenue – struck me as cheerful. In their sitting room (flowered carpet, three chairs shoved together pretending to be a sofa, industrial-sized heater, bookcase bursting with Dennis Wheatley and Hammond Innes, and a mighty votive TV set overlooking all) there was a built-in divan, on which I slept.

One day, my grandfather opened up a storage well beneath the divan to unearth an encyclopedia that might answer some inquiry I had for a school project. To my surprise, a trove of handsome old-timey volumes lay within, their brittle, spotted pages infested by silverfish. They were Fancy Books. I recall there was a volume of poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Actual poems. In a book. By a lord. And, oddly, Proceedings of the New Zealand Legislative Council. Then, I caught a lovely shimmer of mother of pearl and iridescent pāua shell. They formed the cover, it turned out, of a handsome photograph album comprising twenty, thick gilt-edged pages. I was captivated by it at once.

Photograph album bound in brown leather, with part of a metal clasp
and covers inlaid with pāua (abalone) shell, tortoise shell and mother of pearl.

The attraction lay not only in my curiosity about family photographs, but the sense of culture that emanated from this showy object. Culture, in the form of books and art and creativity in general (as opposed to living in a state of ongoing economic emergency), was something that I yearned for, although I couldn’t name the impulse until I was much older.

My grandfather mentioned that the contents of the divan had belonged to his grandfather, but seemed disinclined to offer any more about the man. (William Kelly, I found out later, who emigrated to New Zealand from Ireland with his bride, Frances, in 1863.) I gathered from my grandfather’s reticence about his antecedents that there had been a falling-out somewhere down the line, which perhaps accounted for the careless way the patriarch’s books and other objects had been stored.

By the time I was old enough to realise the historical worth of the divan’s hoard of books, it had disappeared, except for a copy of Hogarth’s Works in folio format, circa 1870. The Hogarth volume was worn through at the extremities and torn at the spine joints, but as I pored over it, turning the pages gingerly, I marvelled at the world within. Rakes and harlots – whatever they were. Marriage à la Mode (The Boudoir of the Countess). Gin Lane. The Midnight Conversation. This book was to prove the entrée ­– when my understanding of its contents improved – to the amazing new land of 18th-century London and, as it turned out, influenced my choice of study at university as well as much of my writing life.

But, that was later. On a first look through the Kellys’ album, I was excited by the subjects. Among them, tattooed Māori women in flounced gowns, a grizzly militia man playing a banjo and two contortionists. And three darkish photographs of Māori that seemed to be printed on metal. 

Contortionist, Wheeler & Son, Christchurch (active 1864-80)

Photograph albums, as far as I knew, were repositories of family experiences. Did I come from people who could count contortionists among their acquaintance? For a very ordinary suburban girl like me, living on the edge of the world, this was a dizzying possibility.

Unidentified Māori women (left), Hemus & Hanna, Auckland (active 1875-85)
and (right), wearing a korowai in cameo vignette, Batt & Richards,
Wellington (active 1867-1874).

Who were these Māori – most in European dress, but others wearing korowai (tag cloaks)? My grandparents could offer no clue. Only one of the photographs was captioned. A soldier wearing an ill-made uniform with sergeant’s stripes was identified as ‘T. Palethorpe 1 WR’. But, who Sergeant Palethorpe was no one could say. Each time I visited my grandparents, I would sit down with the album and stare at the faces it contained, and the detail of their dress, trying to imagine their lives and their state of mind. I attempted to date the photographs according to the style of the women’s gowns, until I worked out how pointless that was given how far fashions in colonial New Zealand lagged behind the times. But I see now that this exercise of looking for clues in the historical record was a sort of primitive early training that I came to put to use researching fiction.

Eventually, when I was in high school, my grandparents gave me the photograph album to keep. As I grew older, I gained new insights into the meaning of its images. That obscure ‘1 WR’, for instance, written on the photograph of T. Palethorpe – it had bothered me for years. Then a school librarian revealed that it stood for ‘1st Waikato Regiment of Militia’ and that led me to read about the New Zealand Wars (or the Māori Wars, as they were known, one-sidedly, when I was in school), a subject that was not included in our history syllabus at that time. I knew more about the battle of Culloden than I did about the battle of Gate Pā. 

Thomas Palethorpe, colour sergeant, 1st Waikato Regiment,
c1864-1870. Photographer unknown.

As I scrutinised these images for clues, I began to wonder about the studios and these early New Zealand photographers.

These two photographs of Māori women with moko [tattooes] were taken by Samuel Carnell (active 1870-1905) in his Napier studio and those below in the Wellington studio of Batt & Richards (active 1867-1874). 

I was amazed to find how numerous photographers were in colonial New Zealand. In 1857 the Lyttleton Times in Christchurch reported the following: 

But it wasn't easy to find out about these things in the days before search engines. I need a bigger library – and when I went to university, I found one. That’s when I discovered that this was not a family album at all – at least, not in my conception of one. It was a collection of cartes de visite – which meant that all these people were strangers.

I knew about calling cards, because people in Victorian novels were always leaving them with butlers, but I had not known that they had played a part in a photography revolution. Technological advances – cameras with multiple lenses, glass negatives – made it possible for images to be mass-produced in the format of a carte de visite. The carte de visite photograph was usually a portrait, printed on paper stuck to uniformly-sized card. It was perfect for mailing off to family and friends in far away places or slipped into a cartouche, a cut-out oval window, in an album. They were made by the millions worldwide until the cabinet format eclipsed them at the end of the century.  

But what about those shiny metallic photographs in the middle of the Kelly album? They were tintypes, or ferrotypes, I discovered, an image exposed on a thin sheet of iron. I also found that in the late 1860s they had largely fallen out of use, which meant I could approximately date the three tintypes in the album.

Māori girl wearing korowai (tag cloak) c. 1865. Unsigned tintype. 

Paper prints had a more natural appearance than the black-base of the tintype and their relative cheapness made them available to a wider range of people. Exchanging cartes de visite with friends and relatives and collecting images of celebrities, notables and curious personages in albums became wildly popular from the 1860s until the last decade of the century.

A New Zealand newspaper columnist observed in 1862, ‘Wherever in our fashionable streets we see a crowd congregated before a shop window, there for certain a number of notabilities are staring back at the crowd in the shape of cartes de visite … A wholesale trade has sprung up with amazing rapidity, and to obtain a good sitter and his permission to sell his carte de visite is in itself an annuity to a man…’

Cartes de visite were a lucrative business opportunity for enterprising photographers, but a small country like New Zealand lacked a deep pool of celebrity subjects. It did have, however, a picturesque indigenous population, an attractive ‘other’ culture of Māori whose tattooes, native dress and proud demeanour made them ideal examples of the kind of exotica that was sought after by CDV collectors. After their defeat in the New Zealand Wars of 1845 to 1872, Māori, like Native Americans, came to be considered a ‘vanishing race’. Documenting a culture that was believed to be on the verge of extinction provided a source of income for photographers trying to make a living in New Zealand. Portraits of Māori became highly marketable, not only to individual consumers, but also as an element of the government's burgeoning tourism strategy. George Pullman, who had opened a studio in Auckland in 1867 specialising in ‘Māori Heads’, sold his negatives to the government in the 1870s. Prints were made from them for display at the New Zealand exhibition at the first official world’s fair at Philadelphia in 1876, and continued to be copied over and again in the twentieth century.

Over the years I have discovered that there is more lodged in the photographs in my great-great-grandparents’ album than at first meets the eye. Now when I look at them, I see other things ­– not least being the irony that William Kelly, who eventually became chair of the New Zealand government’s Native Affairs Committee, because he ‘knew natives well’, and my school-teacher great-great-aunt, who encouraged Māori children to learn English, flourished by farming on confiscated land. Of course they too were links in a chain of dispossession that began in Ireland. Life goes up and down like the grass, and sure enough, all the Kellys’ holdings came to be lost, too, one way or another as the twentieth century staggered from war into a depression. Now, there seems to be nothing left of William Kelly and his achievements but this album, and that battered Hogarth. And his descendants.