The bier in the streets of Venice (generated with AI).
Anyone who walks around with a camera knows this feeling.
You carry certain images in your head—scenes you saw clearly, moments that would have made an extraordinary photograph, if only you had been a second faster. But you weren’t. The camera was still in your bag, or your hands hesitated, or reality simply moved on. The moment vanished. The image, however, never does. It stays etched on your retina.
This time it happened in Venice.
Walking through the city as a tourist, drifting between alleys and canals, I was suddenly overtaken by something utterly unexpected: a bier mounted on bicycle wheels, pushed briskly forward. A body lay beneath a white shroud. A priest followed, visibly struggling to keep up with both the pace and his companion.
It passed in a flash.
I am convinced that more than half of the tourists around me didn’t even register what they had just seen. There were no sirens, no solemn procession—just a fleeting, almost surreal interruption of the Venetian rhythm. And then it was gone.
I never raised my camera in time. But the image lodged itself firmly in my mind.
Later, unable to let it go, I turned to AI to reconstruct the scene as faithfully as possible—not as a replacement for the photograph I failed to take, but as an attempt to give form to a moment that refused to disappear.
Some photographs are never taken. But that doesn’t mean they are lost.
