Morris, Wright. Venetian Journal by Wright Morris.

Harper & Row, 1972. [Color photos and text by the highly respected writer and photographer, author of The Inhabitants, et al.] 1st edition. Very good in red cloth, water stain at bottom of rear cover that does not affect pages or the protected dust jacket which is very good with minor edge wear. 

Wright Morris (1910–1998) was an acclaimed American novelist, essayist, and photographer recognized for pioneering the "photo-text" genre that seamlessly paired documentary photography with fictional prose. Born in Central City,Nebraska, Morris drew deep inspiration from the landscape and material culture of the Great Plains, capturing stark black-and-white images of weathered farmhouses, abandoned interiors, antique furniture, and everyday artifacts during trips across rural America in the late 1930s and 1940s. Rather than using photographs to illustrate his written narrative directly,he placed image and text side-by-side to evoke a shared sense of nostalgia, memory, and the unseen human presence behind ordinary objects, most notably in groundbreaking books such as The Inhabitants (1946) and The Home Place(1948). Though he earned major literary accolades—including the National Book Award for fiction—Morris was also awarded multiple Guggenheim Fellowships for his photography, cementing his dual legacy as both a major 20th-century American author and a master of quiet, poetic documentary imagery.

Love Affair: A Venetian Journal is a 95-page "photo-text" book written and photographed by the acclaimed American novelist and photographer Wright Morris. The volume marks a distinct departure from Morris’s famous black-and-white documentary works of the rural American Midwest, offering instead a lyrical, full-color exploration of Venice, Italy.

Overview of the Book

• The Author: Wright Morris was a National Book Award-winning writer who pioneered the "photo-text" format, a genre where his own prose and photographs sit side-by-side to create a unified narrative layer.

• Content & Structure: The large, square-format book contains 44 full-page color photographs taken by Morris during a stay in Venice with his wife. Rather than pairing individual photos directly to captions or specific plot points, the atmospheric images are juxtaposed with brief, impressionistic prose passages, diary entries, and vignettes.

• The Medium: Notably, this was Morris's first major foray into color photography, capturing his snapshots of the city on a humble 35mm camera as a deliberate counterpoint to his stark, historical black-and-white style.

Core Themes and Focus Areas

The book moves past traditional tourist tropes to capture the texture of everyday life in an extraordinary landscape.

• The Pedestrian City: Morris celebrates Venice at eye level, focusing heavily on the physical act of walking. He highlights how the city has completely escaped what he calls the "tyranny of wheels," allowing human beings to stroll, dawdle, and exist at a completely natural, unhurried pace.

• Salvaging the Ephemeral: Written during a period when the public was growing increasingly aware of Venice's environmental vulnerabilities, Morris’s epigraph famously notes that the project was born from an intent to "salvage something of a love affair" with a city threatened by high tides, decay, and modern encroaching traffic.

• The Everyday Visual Labyrinth: Rather than zeroing in on grand tourist landmarks, Morris focuses his camera lens on mundane, quotidian details—weathered doors, quiet side canals, flapping laundry, neighborhood cats, and the intricate geometry of ancient alleys—to capture the true essence of living in the city.