Along with New York City and Paris, the Italian city of Venice is probably one of the most photographed cities in the world. There is no corner of the City of Water than hasn’t been caught on camera and put on the internet. But with this series, Berlin-based photographer Jessica Backhaus has managed to depict the city in a totally non-cliché — not to mention beautiful — way. To do so, she turned the camera downward, toward the water, to capture Venice in watery reflections.
The results, collected in a book called I Wanted To See The World, portray show the city’s beautiful buildings marbled and malformed on the surface of the Adriatic Sea. The subtle play of light and color on the rippling waters create gorgeous painterly abstractions that are impossible not to love.
In the book’s preface, critic Alexa Becker nicely summarizes the work:
Distortion and transformation now enter into Backhaus’s work for the first time, and in some cases an utter refusal to imbue the images with any particular sentiment. If there is a system of metaphors at work here, then they are conveyed in a very subtle, sophisticated manner.
See? There’s life in travel photography yet!
(via Co.Design)