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Opening Reception: October 4th, 6-8 PM
Steven Kasher Gallery is pleased to exhibit Christopher Thomas: Venice in Solitude. The exhibition
presents a selection of large-scale black and white photographs of Venice by the Munich-based
photographer Christopher Thomas. The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Christopher
Thomas: Venice in Solitude (Prestel, 2012). In these hauntingly beautiful photographs, Thomas takes
us on a solitary tour of the city known as “The Most Serene Republic.” Viewers can almost feel the
ghosts of Titian and Vivaldi, of Henry James and Thomas Mann wandering the canals and
cobblestones. We experience the city as an ingenious and luminous oasis of majesty and calm.
This is our second solo exhibition of the artist’s work. As in the case of his previous exhibition and
publication, New York Sleeps Thomas presents photographs taken with a large-format camera and a
no-longer-manufactured Polaroid negative film. These enable his prints to achieve a degree of detail
and tonal nuance rarely found in contemporary black and white photography. Again, as he did in New
York, Thomas shoots at dawn, when no other people are on the scene. It is if, at this moment when
night borders day, he could uncover the essence of the city, erasing the profane and quotidian in favor
of the eternal or timeless.
Included are classic views of the palaces along the Grand Canal, the Doge’s Palace, the Piazza San
Marco, the Rialto Bridge and many other monuments. Thomas also strayed from well-known paths to
photograph areas of the city which are not part of our collective memories of Venice: abandoned
canals and workshops in Cannaregio, the narrow streets in Castello decked with washing-lines and the
Gondola shipyard of San Trovaso in Dorsoduro.
Christopher Thomas was born in Munich, in 1961. His photojournalism for Geo, Stern, Merian, and
other magazines have received numerous international prizes. His book New York Sleeps was awarded
the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis in 2009. An extensive selection of his images from the famous
Oberammergau Passion Play (also published as a book by Prestel) were recently on view in the
Bavarian National Museum.
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