The city of Benidorm has featured as a recurring subject within the body of work of a number of great photographers that I admire. These photographs and also the various tales and television programmes from this city have, over many years, encouraged within me a curious desire to visit. The photographs that I loved and studied held their focus on the tourists of Benidorm; their eating and drinking habits, their obsession with the sun, and their yearning for something akin to home, albeit without the weather.  

When an opportunity arose to visit in the summer of 2024, it was the urban qualities and the landscapes that shocked me far more than the activities of the strip - perhaps because they were the elements that I was not expecting to find. This is not to deny the exciting spectacle of the strip itself; in all its brightly coloured, brightly lit, and fibreglass-ornamented glory. But above neon signage and mechanical bulls stood towering modernist buildings, graceful and elegant, with wide-spanning glazing and fine, painted steel balustrades, each with their own balconies shaded by striped canvas awnings. Then in the near distance were the mountains, and a rugged rock and cacti-encrusted landscape, littered with detritus, abandoned buildings, forgotten nightclubs and highway billboards. It was my own coincidental fortune to be staying out in this landscape, and each day I would carry my medium format camera and tripod down through the deserts and an area colloquially known as the ‘wasteland’, to arrive eventually at the strip, and then the ocean.

I was struck by this contrasting landscape – a city of pleasures caught between arid desert and a turquoise ocean – and immediately it was this sequencing that I wanted to study and try to evoke in the photographs that I made.

I shot with a medium format studio camera, almost always on a tripod, which made my work slow. Exposure times were long, purposefully, in order to focus the eye on the landscapes and urban scenes at play, with people drifting in and out of these scenes. The large 6 x 7 negatives capture a lot of fine detail, but the long exposures lend a sense of stillness or quietness to the scenes, despite the dense layers of urban space that they depict.

Symbols and structures from the desert landscapes behind are contrasted with the frontal architecture of the strip itself, in an attempt to capture the visual presence of a fragmentary and broken landscape, where elements of pleasure juxtapose elements of melancholy or abandonment. When walking across Benidorm, the city is experienced in this way – a patchwork of entertainment with another weave of a living city and its landscape poking through the gaps.

Fine modernist buildings host ‘supermercados’ selling cans of Stella and rubber-ring floatation devices, and just a few blocks behind the city dissolves to become a wild and unkempt landscape of mountains, crumbling villas, abandoned clubs, go-karting tracks and truck stops.