In his famous 1818 poem, Lord Byron set up an uncanny pendulum between disappointment and romanticism when describing Venice. Opening its doors at Canopy Collections HQ in Bloomsbury, London, and running until July 3, 2026, Isabelle Young’s debut major solo exhibition, titled “Venice As I Was,” draws heavily from that exact melancholic tone left behind by Byron—but this time, not with words, but through the chemistry of water and light: through photographs.
The title of the exhibition invokes the memory of not just a submerged geography, but of a self that once existed in the streets of that geography, now left in the past. The frames filtered through Young’s viewfinder completely reject the grand, postcard-perfect, tourist-swarmed monumental Venice. Instead, she guides us through the textures of terrazzo floors washed in aquatic light, the fractures of light seeping through the gaps of massive doors, and the suppressed silence descending upon Campo Santa Maria Formosa in the dead of winter. These photographs function like the intimate diary of a personal relationship that ended as turbulently as the lagoon’s tides, wrapped in ecological grief.
Every stain and worn texture in the photographs spreads across architectural surfaces like the tragic handwriting of the acqua alta—the seasonal tidal floods conquering the city with a progressively harsher rhythm. The pale remnants of dried water on stone step-by-step document the environmental fragility of a city agonizing in the grip of rising sea levels and overtourism. Appearing as vague silhouettes in the series, the state-of-the-art flood prevention barriers ironically resemble not fortresses protecting the city, but an early confession of an inevitable loss, an approaching absolute end.
Nominated for the prestigious Prix Pictet in 2025 and subsequently shortlisted for the Photo London x Nikon Emerging Photographer Award, Isabelle Young proves with this exhibition that she possesses a powerful and lyrical voice in contemporary photography. In the serene atmosphere of Bloomsbury, while tracing the mineral stains embedded in the walls of a sinking city, you realize that every frame is a futile yet enchanting resistance against the flow of time. As the water rises, the only thing that remains is that volatile, damp memory that we were once there.
Do you think that photographing a city slowly being swallowed by water is a way to immortalize its architecture, or is it a document proving that we have already surrendered to the destructive and fluid power of time that sweeps everything away?
The exhibition will continue until July 3, 2026.
Exhibition Details:
- Artist: Isabelle Young
- Exhibition Title: Venice As I Was
- Venue: Canopy Collections HQ, Bloomsbury, London
- Closing Date: July 3, 2026
- Key Themes: Ecological grief, acqua alta, architectural decay, and transient memory.
