WORDS Karen Parr-Moody
T
here is a whiff of the Grand Tour in the Italian images taken by Susan Bryant, a professor of art at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. Bryant captures the romance of the Grand Tour forays that date to the 1500s, capturing photographs of the very sights that would have inspired those early privileged travelers. When dapper young aristocrats polished off their formal education via the Grand Tour, they visited such Italian cities as Rome, Venice, Florence, Pisa, and Genoa. In 2014, Bryant visited Montepulciano, Venice, Florence, and Rome with her digital camera in tow. Over five centuries, thousands of English gentlemen viewed the splendid ruins and statues that Bryant has captured so brilliantly with her modern-day lens and a 19th-century photographic process called wet-plate collodion process, invented in 1851.
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