Venice is a city whose measure has always been water.

Before it is monument, architecture or image, Venice is an extraordinary agreement between stone and lagoon. Its campanili, palazzi, churches, fondamenta, islands, bricole and gondolas acquire their meaning through a precise relationship of scale: between the vertical and the horizontal, between the weight of architecture and the apparent immateriality of the water supporting it.

The city does not simply stand beside water.

It emerges from it.

Byron understood this almost two centuries ago when he imagined Venice rising directly from the waves. In that image, architecture and water cannot be separated. One gives measure to the other.

Resizing Venice began in 2012 from the perception that this measure was being disturbed.

While photographing the lagoon, I watched an immense cruise ship enter the visual field of the historic city. The encounter was almost absurd. A moving object designed according to another logic and another order of magnitude suddenly became larger than the city against which it appeared. Campanili, domes and palazzi ceased to be the principal elements of the image. Venice became their background.

That first photograph became the starting point for a personal photographic manifesto developed over the following years and presented from 2012 onward under titles including A Manifesto Against Big Boats in Venice, Resizing Venice and Rescaling Venice.

The word resizing is deliberately ambiguous.

Who is resizing whom?

Is the ship enlarged by its proximity to the historic city, or is Venice visually reduced by the presence of the ship?

The ship does not merely enter the image. It changes the unit of measurement by which Venice is perceived.

Architecture has always depended upon proportion. Scale allows us to understand the relationship between the human body, a building and a city. Venice possesses an unusually coherent scale, produced over centuries by the dimensions of its canals, islands, bridges, boats, streets, squares and buildings. Even its monumental architecture remains embedded within this system.

The cruise ship belongs to another order of magnitude.

When the two appear within the same visual field, the ship becomes architecture, architecture becomes scenery, and Venice is momentarily transformed into the backdrop of the machine approaching it.

This reversal lies at the centre of Resizing Venice.

The series deliberately moves between two Venices.

One is the city as it reveals itself through water: San Giorgio Maggiore suspended on the horizon; gondolas dissolving slightly during a long exposure; the vertical rhythm of wooden bricole against the lagoon; distant islands; façades whose scale remains legible because sufficient space still exists around them.

In these photographs Venice is constructed through interval, distance, silence and proportion.

Water is not empty space between buildings.

It is the visual field that allows the city to breathe.

The other Venice is interrupted.

A vast white body enters the frame.

Sometimes the ship remains recognizable. Elsewhere, the long exposure transforms it into a spectral horizontal mass. Its passage temporarily erases portions of the city behind it. Churches disappear. Campanili become fragments. The skyline is rewritten.

The photographic technique is essential to this narrative.

Long exposures transform the lagoon into an almost continuous surface. Gondolas and smaller boats become traces. Water loses its instantaneous appearance and acquires duration. The historic city remains comparatively stable while movement becomes uncertain.

The large cruise ships create another kind of trace.

They do not simply cross the landscape. They overwhelm its scale.

In images such as Resizing Venice 2, Resizing Venice 3 and White Ghost 2, the vessel is progressively transformed from object into interruption: a horizontal fracture crossing a city whose image has taken centuries to construct.

There is a paradox here.

Venice itself was created through navigation. Its identity is inseparable from ships, trade, movement and exchange. The history of La Serenissima cannot be imagined without the sea.

Resizing Venice is therefore not an argument against ships.

Nor is it an argument against movement.

The conflict begins when movement ceases to remain compatible with the physical and visual scale of the place through which it passes.

A gondola belongs to the canal not because it is picturesque, but because its dimensions participate in the spatial logic of the city. A vaporetto participates in that system in another way. They establish relationships with façades, bridges, fondamenta and the width of the waterways through which they move.

A vessel towering over the neighbouring urban fabric establishes a radically different relationship.

Its scale ceases to describe Venice.

It describes itself.

The project began in 2012, when the passage of large cruise ships through the monumental waters of Venice was still part of the ordinary machinery of mass tourism. What I perceived then as a disturbance of scale and visual integrity would subsequently become part of a much larger international discussion concerning the preservation of Venice and its lagoon.

Years later, UNESCO would explicitly identify large ships as a threat to the visual integrity of the World Heritage site, drawing attention to the discrepancy between the dimensions of contemporary vessels and the historic city.

In 2021, Italy prohibited the passage of large ships exceeding defined size and tonnage thresholds through the Bacino di San Marco, the Canale di San Marco and the Canale della Giudecca.

The photographs preceded that prohibition by almost a decade.

They were never intended as evidence for a future regulation. They began instead with something much simpler: the immediate perception that an object had entered the image and altered the scale through which the city could be understood.

Photography became a way of measuring that alteration.

This is also why Resizing Venice is fundamentally a narrative about water.

The lagoon is not merely the location in which these photographs were made. Water performs several roles simultaneously. It is the historical condition that made Venice possible; the medium through which people, goods and images move; the distance from which architecture is perceived; and the reflective plane upon which the city continuously reconstructs its appearance.

Water carries the gondola.

Water carries the cruise ship.

But these two presences do not produce the same Venice.

The quieter photographs in the series contain large areas of apparent emptiness. That emptiness is intentional. It gives architecture room to exist. It restores the interval between observer and city. It allows a church, an island, a gondola or a campanile to occupy the image without being forced to compete with an object of another magnitude.

The photographs containing the cruise ships break that silence.

The sequence therefore operates through an oscillation between equilibrium and rupture, presence and disappearance, permanence and transit.

The vessel arrives.

The scale changes.

Parts of the city disappear.

The vessel passes.

Venice becomes visible again.

Yet Resizing Venice is not a nostalgic demand to immobilise the city.

Venice has never been static. Its extraordinary history is a history of transformation, adaptation, invention and exchange. A living city cannot be preserved by turning it into an untouchable image of its own past.

Preservation means something else.

It means recognising the point beyond which transformation begins to erase the qualities that make a place irreplaceable.

And in Venice those qualities do not reside exclusively in stones.

They exist in relationships.

Distance is part of the heritage.

Silhouette is part of the heritage.

Scale is part of the heritage.

The uninterrupted possibility of seeing an island, a dome or a campanile across the surface of the lagoon is part of the cultural landscape itself.

Byron saw Venice rising from water as if produced by an act of enchantment. Two centuries later, protecting Venice means preserving the conditions that still allow that apparition to occur.

Not Venice reconstructed after its image has been erased.

Not Venice reduced to scenery.

Not Venice resized to accommodate the objects that pass through it.

The lagoon is not the empty foreground of the city.

It is the distance through which Venice becomes visible.

And perhaps this is the essential question behind Resizing Venice:

How large can an object become before the place around it begins to disappear?

The photographs do not answer through nostalgia. They simply return to a measure.

Water.
Distance.
Silhouette.
Architecture.

Venice, at the scale of Venice.

Brief biography

Alexandru Crișan is a Romanian architect, visual artist and photographer based in Bucharest. Holding a PhD in Architecture, he teaches at the “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urbanism and develops an interdisciplinary artistic practice situated between photography, architecture, memory and the constructed image. His photographic work investigates perception, scale, cultural memory and the unstable relationship between reality and representation. Architecture and the city frequently function in his work not simply as subjects, but as systems through which identity, history and visual experience are questioned. Crișan’s work has been presented in more than 50 exhibitions and featured in over 100 international publications, receiving numerous awards, selections and nominations in photography and contemporary art competitions. His recent practice includes the photographic series Fragmenta Deorum, Dark Paradise, and long-term projects concerned with urban landscape and cultural heritage, including Resizing Venice, begun in 2012 as a photographic manifesto addressing the transformation of Venice’s historic visual scale by large cruise ships. He lives and works in Bucharest, Romania.

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