Carnival. The world’s oldest bacchanal.The greatest party on earth. During the weeks preceding Lent, in thousands of cities, towns, and villages spread across six continents, everyday people shed their workaday identities, don outrageous disguises, and step out into a world of mutually suspended reality, into spaces where imagination roams wild and the normal rules of status and propriety are upended. It's a ritual that has been celebrated, in myriad guises, every year for over a thousand years, and whose roots reach back deep into the mists of human prehistory.

I have been on a quest to discover Carnival for the last ten years. I've wandered the backstreets of New Orleans with gangs of Mardi Gras Indians. I ran the Courir du Mardi Gras in rural Louisiana chasing chickens and doing my best to avoid the leather whips of the notorious Villains. I've danced in the streets of Rio de Janeiro and I snuck into the legendary Copacabana Magic Ball to document the debauchery. But one place kept calling me back: Venice, la Serenissima, jewel of the Adriatic Sea. It’s not that Venice has the best Carnival — it most certainly doesn’t — but it does host the most striking setting. What’s more, something about the idea of the Venetian Carnival got into my system, and the more I worked with the images I captured there the more this idea of magic, mystery, and the mask seeped in.

At some point, I started playing with my images from Venice, and in a night’s time, I created four strangely evocative images by layering and compositing multiple photos. As the initial creative rush slowed down I developed a method to the madness, a set of metaphors to work by. I had collected shots of decaying stucco walls and worn marble streets, and these became my canvases, to represent the faded glory of Venice and give the photos a feeling of lost time. In some of the photos, I layered in reflections from canals to evoke the sense of mysteries lying beneath the surface, and the disintegration of ordinary reality. Some images just seemed to fall in place together, and in other cases, a single image would come alive with a little background texture.

The resulting images to me evoke a sense of what Carnival dreams itself to be — strange, magical, alluring — rather than the more pedestrian reality on the ground. Truth is, Carnival has been bought and sold in Venice and the streets are choked with kiosks selling cheap plastic masks from China. Locals leave town to avoid the crowds. During the last weekend of the celebration, the alleys are so thronged with young European partiers wearing street clothes that you might wonder if you’ve got your dates correct. But you can always find Carnival if you know where to look. Piazza San Marco is alive with pomp and tradition, and inside Caffe Florian, it’s a scene from another time. And in some dark corner of a dead-end alleyway, a young couple is exploring love or something like it. The spirit of Carnival, that irrepressible Dionysian fever, lives on.