There are billions of photographs taken of Venice. The gondola, the bridge, the acqua alta, pigeons in St. Mark’s Square—these images have practically become shortcuts for perception; we already see them before we actually look at them. But what happens if someone brushes aside all that crowded visual cortex and focuses instead on the places where Venice grows heavy, sinks, and gets tired? Isabelle Young’s series “Venice As I Was” does exactly that.
Born in 1989, London-based photographer Young is an artist who has been nominated for the Prix Pictet and shortlisted for the Photo London x Nikon Award. Having mounted solo exhibitions at spaces such as Galerie Fabian Lang (Zurich), SOCO Gallery (Charlotte, USA), and Cedric Bardawil Gallery, this body of work marks her first encounter with Canopy Collections in Bloomsbury.
The exhibition carries the spirit of Byron’s poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (1818)—the gaze of a flâneur swaying between romanticism and ruin. Yet Young does not present this within a touristy or nostalgic frame. Her Venice is not the Venice of the postcard; it is liquid light spilling over terrazzo floors, fractures of light entering eroded porticos, garden walls collapsed under salt storms, and Campielli wrapped in winter silence. For Young, the marks left on the surfaces of architecture by acqua alta—the tidal waters hitting the shores increasingly frequently and harshly—are not a crisis narrative, but a slow handwriting.
The recently constructed flood barriers also feature in the exhibition. These structures were built to protect the city; however, Young simultaneously reads them as a document of accepted loss. Venice is now both protected and already defeated—and these two realities are true at the exact same time.
Bearing the influence of Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri, these works transform the extraordinary into something ordinary instead of dramatizing it; they capture the whisper of the crisis rather than the crisis itself. Within the frame, there is always something missing or surplus—an incomplete meaning, an unforeseen fall of light.
Canopy Collections is a gallery founded in 2020 by founders Louise Chignac and Cécile Ganansia; it opened its permanent space in Bloomsbury in 2024. In this gallery, whose program dedicates significant room to international contemporary photography, Young’s works stand as one of the most elegant and earnest portraits of Venice waiting to be seen.
Exhibition Details:
- Venue: Canopy Collections, 3 Bloomsbury Place, London WC1, UK
- Artist: Isabelle Young
- Exhibition Title: Venice As I Was
- Dates: May 12 – July 3, 2026 (Extended until July 17, 2026)
