Once, in Venice

Once in Venice is not a travel guide or a simple memoir. It is a luminous, haunting meditation on time, memory, and the fragile art of seeing. In the stark winter of 2002, writer and photographer Max Nabati embarked on a singular pilgrimage to the Venice Carnival, armed not with a tourist's curiosity but with a salvager's urgency: three hundred rolls of film and a mission to "fix" a vanishing world onto silver halide.

Accompanied by his friend Paul, a French scholar with a poet's eye, Nabati...