VENICE PHOTOGRAPHER
VENICE IS WHITE, GREEN AND BROWN: How to dress for a photoshoot in Venice
If you know Venice, you know she changes colour like a chameleon. Sky-blue and blinding at a summer midday; orange at sunset; black with accents of gold, if you have lost your way among the calli after dark.
And if you stay a few days, you will live many Venices: one for every light, one for every sky.
This article is not about fleeting perceptions but about the colours of her contemporary soul: Venice is white, green and brown.
The wardrobe counts as much as the quality of the framing: the wrong outfit undoes the photoshoot. This is why I consider it very important to decide on the clothing early, and together.
If you wish to dress for Venice ‘like Venice’, the advice is already written: your colours too will be white, green and brown.
You may also choose to stand out. In that case, according to your person, the other colours come into play – the shades of blue, a mild distinction, or black, like the gondolas. Beware of yellow and red, the most difficult to wear; but not even black is easy.
Much depends on you: you too ‘are’ colours, and you have a form. I shall return to this below – and, separately and at length, in the instructions I send to those who entrust me with a commission.
Let us return to the three colours of Venice, those of her contemporary soul. The couple I show you in this story chose to follow them: they do not detach themselves by standing out – they integrate, they blend in.
Dressed in the three colours (his grey is a fully accepted variant of white), the two enter the scenography as an integral part of the urban environment.
This holds for the city of Venice, mind you – certainly not for Burano, among its coloured houses, where every bright tone finds an echo.
White, in Burano, fears no comparison: the houses come in every colour, and no one can claim to have matched the surroundings except with a ‘non-coloured colour’ – the surroundings own them all.
With this awareness, and with my guidance during the poses, what the camera does fades into the background: Venice ceases to be a destination hosting you as a stranger – you become part of her.
Look at the architecture: white is the line that underscores the windows, frames the doors, defines the outlines.
Details the eye overlooks but photography emphasises.
The white matter of Venice has a name: Istrian stone. A compact limestone, almost marble, which crossed the Adriatic from the Istrian quarries to settle upon the wooden foundations and bear the palaces that seem risen from the water.
Dense to the point of being almost impermeable, it withstands salt, frost and water (even the ‘alta’ kind) without flaking: this is why the builders laid it at the foot of the walls, in defence of the brick.
Today you see it white, in all its candour — this is why I speak of a contemporary soul. But it was once customary to coat it in multicoloured paints: in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, frescoed architecture was decorated in its finishes with vivid colours — red, blue, green, gold.
The Ca’ d’Oro, today candidly white, owes its name to the gilding that once set its façade alight. Outside, that paint has vanished; inside some churches it still survives almost intact.
In ancient painting, white belongs to heaven: divine light, purity, the robes of the angels and of the Risen Christ.
And bridal white, which many believe was born in the nineteenth century, was born right here: it was Venice, as early as the sixteenth century, that dressed her brides in white. After all, white was already the Venetian colour of great occasions: when Henry III of France visited the city, in 1574, two hundred gentlewomen welcomed him dressed in white and covered in jewels. The rest of Europe would imitate the brides of Venice only centuries later.
A figure in white, in Venice, is not merely an aesthetic choice: it also represents these spiritual qualities.
For a child, green is the grass: life growing, the nature that surrounds us.
In the city of Venice the wild is rare – to find it you must go out into the lagoon – and yet green is everywhere, if you know how to see it.
It is in her eyes, which are the windows; in the water of the canals embracing walls and palaces; in her gardens, more or less secret.
And green are so many doors – thresholds which, with a touch of playful imagination, promise the unknown.
For the painters of old, green is the colour of hope and rebirth: spring, the sap returning.
Even in a calle without a single leaf, the vitality of green reaches you, and you have it in the water, which kindles reflections that are also white and brown.
But take care: in Venice green is never saturated, and your outfit must follow the same rule.
Venetian, too, is the most celebrated green in painting: Veronese green, created alchemically by Paolo Caliari – called il Veronese, precisely – the better to paint the atmospheric veil that desaturates and cools distant landscapes. It still bears his name; the nineteenth century merely reformulated its chemical composition, to make it more stable and free of toxicity.
A discreet green – the green of Venice: let your ‘Venetian’ outfit follow it.
Brown, in Venice, is a ready-made effect: it is the predominant colour of the architecture, and its patina comes from the centuries, from its being ancient.
The brown outfit, and beige with it, represents the Venetian building, its masonry: it is the colour that most becomes one with the city.
Water, air and time paint Venice in layers of brown: even when the plaster peels and falls away, the wall remains brown, with its bricks laid bare.
No one can stop this colour in Venice: one can only admire it, and immerse oneself in it.
In ancient symbolism, brown was the earth: humility – the very word comes from humus, earth – the friar’s habit, the matter that receives the seed.
To wear it is to attune yourself to the natural order of things.
Now you know the colours of Venice’s soul: on your next visit you will see what once escaped you – and in the images of your photoshoot, those colours could be yours as well.
Colours are a language that precedes words. Combining them is an art with rules of its own – and in Italy, image consultants have given it a name: armocromia, the harmony of colours.
In the English-speaking world the same discipline is called Seasonal Colour Analysis: a formula that states the technique but silences the harmony. This is why, for my English-speaking readers, I coined the term Armochromy: the harmony deserved to remain in the name, and to take one of Italian derivation – from Italy, mother of the arts.
Let us now go deeper into colour theory applied to people, starting from a principle written into Creation: each of us carries our own colours.
Complexion, hair, eyes – and even nails, if covered with polish – compose your personal palette, and they always interact with the outfit: they welcome it or reject it.
This is why the same garment that dulls one person illuminates another: there are no ‘more beautiful’ colours in absolute terms, there are colours in harmony with yours.
Hence the rule that matters above all others: an outfit is chosen while worn, never on its own.
Only before the mirror do you see the truth: your figure lighting up or dimming, your bearing gaining or losing personality.
And when the outfit is for a photoshoot, the mirror is not enough: the final test is to photograph yourself. The two-dimensional vision of photography transforms every aesthetic relationship: only a photograph can tell you how you will look in a photograph.
And that is not all. You too are a form – your body – and the outfit is another form, laid upon yours, in contact: it clothes you and becomes one with you.
You are portrayed inseparably together with what you wear, in colours as in forms.
This is why the line of a garment, too, is judged on the person, never on the hanger: worn, it becomes your line; hung, it is only theory.
Then there is the rule of the trade, for here we speak of photography: solid colour.
In real life, stripes and patterns can please: the eye works in three dimensions, separates the planes, brings order. Photography does not: it is two-dimensional, and what was pleasing becomes, in the image, an element of disturbance, a vibration that steals attention from the face and makes the human figure look scribbled over.
It adds patterns to other patterns, those of the surroundings, without any reasoned coordination. This is why, in photographic work, solid colour is in effect a fixed rule, recognised by photographers the world over – the bane of fashion photographers, who must know how to render a striped or patterned garment without it looking like a failure.
These are the principles that interweave with the harmony we started from: the one between you and the place.
And this is where you stop being portrayed in Venice, and begin to be portrayed of her.
Venice has a strong character: she imposes herself, aesthetically, on all who pass through her.
With her, harmony is not negotiated: either you follow her, or you set yourself apart – and those who set themselves apart, unless they do so knowingly, remain a guest out of place, a foreign body in the beauty that surrounds them.
Following Venice does not mean dressing up in costume.
A paradoxical example: wearing the reproduction of an eighteenth-century gown, outside Carnival, would today be ridiculous.
Following Venice means rather quoting the ancient, attuning modernity to it, and certainly respecting its fundamental rules – the first: a woman wears a skirt.
We are not in New York. Women’s trousers, in Venice, are a modernity out of place, clashing against centuries of history: ‘immiscible’, as one would say in chemistry.
Our two protagonists chose an elegant and strong path: the cut and the taste of the 1940s and 1950s.
A quotation that serves not to enter the ancient, but to declare a detachment from modernity.
Before that, though, it serves to tell of them: talented devotees of the dances of those years, they dressed their own character, not a costume. And their outfits, naturally, are in solid colours: the rule you have just read, applied.
The result you see in these pages: three protagonists in ‘Armochromy’ – the two of them, and Venice.
White, green and brown have revealed their secret to you: they are the visual essence of the city – Light, Life, Matter.
Now you are aware of it, which is why, wearing this palette, which suits almost anyone, you too could be at one with Venice, and your story would take on a timeless aura – a perfect one, for that traditional elegance which fairy tales treasure, Venice possesses.
And this couple did exactly that. The images you see are a selection of those delivered to them, the fruit of a full-day project which we divided into two half-days.
The Venice of ‘unguided’ tourists is superficial and overcrowded – guided by me, you discover that it need not be: you know where to go, and the crowds stay elsewhere.
It is not merely photographing: it is coming to know Venice with an awareness the average tourist never attains – for it is also an itinerary of discovery.
And the purpose of it all is that you should never truly have to leave the city: La Serenissima will come home with you, thanks to the photographic story, which has her too as a protagonist, not a mere backdrop.
Alongside me, for part of the photoshoot, I recommend booking a professional tourist guide: the city will open to you in her innermost depths.
On request, as an extra, you can have not me – a photographer by trade, who knows the rest only out of passion – but a true image consultant – precious help in choosing the outfits best suited to your personal Armochromy.
The right gondolier or, if needed, the loveliest vintage wooden water taxi I shall recommend myself: it matters that they are collaborative and follow my directions.
‘Is it worth it?’ – and its silent twin: ‘what if the final images are not up to standard?’. These are the two legitimate doubts of anyone weighing an investment like this, and they deserve an orderly answer.
The quality of the images is the responsibility of the method. A frame is built with precision, not picked up along the way; and as for posing, with me as director you need no skill at all: a few gentle instructions are enough – give me a few minutes, and I can turn even a block of Istrian stone into an accomplished actor.
As for the value: what the investment opens is not a number of hours, but a complete creative work. The conception, the itinerary planned around the movement of the sun, the places my colleagues have never discovered, the session itself, the meticulous post-production, the final sequence edited as one story. Not the clock: the completed project.
This is why my projects are not priced by the hour. The investment opens a project and reserves the day, each formula with its own maximum of hours: a one-hour session and a five-hour session carry the same investment.
Let me explain this a little better – take me as someone who cares deeply about what he does, not as someone getting carried away.
What do I gain from creating a three-hour project instead of a five-hour one, when I am genuinely passionate about my work?
What I find, in practice, is that I then have to achieve the same result in less time – probably without doing it quite as well. I enjoy what I do, and I want the time to do it properly, rather than constantly feeling I am rushing towards the next location.
And, in the end, what do two fewer hours of photography actually mean, compared with the time invested in conceiving the project, planning the itinerary, editing the images, and carrying out the fine-art post-production? Very little.
The real difference is what happens during those hours: the freedom to explore, to notice something unexpected, to stop when the light is right, and to build the kind of coherent visual narrative that takes time to create.
With my projects, the Venice that stays with you is the one the vast majority of visitors never notice – and a story that remains when the journey fades.
Full-Day Narrative Photography Project – €1,670 (recommended)
I am at your disposal for up to ten consecutive hours, during which you may also decide to take breaks, or to change outfits.
An emotionally edited sequence of 200 or more post-produced images, presented as a coherent visual narrative – including skin colour correction and retouching, and the careful de-wrinkling of clothing.
We will reach hidden corners still unpublished even in photographers’ blogs, spending the day together without haste.
Images delivered straight to your email within ten days.
We can also plan the project across two half-days instead of a single full day: this makes it easier to reach the finest locations, and lets us work with better light, choosing time and place according to the direction of the sun.
Half-Day Narrative Photography Project – €1,270
Up to five consecutive hours of availability.
120 or more post-produced images, with the same artistic approach and the same meticulous post-production.
Images delivered straight to your email within ten days.
Surprise Proposal Narrative Photography Project – €570
NB – available exclusively for surprise proposals.
As with every project of mine, complete planning assistance is included.
Beyond documenting the proposal, I am also available for a couple photoshoot.
Up to two consecutive hours of availability.
Images delivered straight to your email within five days.
Extra for next-day delivery, subject to availability: €220.
See you in the world's most beautiful pearl.
So, here we are…
Looks like Venice is calling. Fancy having me as your photographer while we’re there? 😉
See you in your fairy tale!