Michel Houellebecq has taken and published many photographs of hotel complexes on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, which make them look like prison camps that have gotten out of hand. Most of these towers were built under the fascist regime of General Franco, who actually invented tourism as an industry in Spain. That probably explains a lot, including why Michel Houellebecq can’t get enough of it. After all, it was not just yesterday that he said that there is a special connection between the commercial and the totalitarian.
The Finnish photographer Verna Kovanen, born in 1989, also photographed holiday resorts on the Mediterranean for her photo book “Broken Holiday Album”, but her perspective could not be more different. Kovanen does not photograph the resorts as an example, but personally, from the perspective of an emotionally involved person who once spent a carefree time there and is now documenting a double loss: that of the resorts and that of the carefree time.
Verna Kovanen: Broken Holiday Album. Kerber Verlag, Bielefeld 2022. 96 pages, 35 euros.
(Photo: Kerber Verlag)
Kovanen once likened the hotels and pools and outdoor pools featured in The Broken Holiday Album to books that gather dust in the corner while the stories they tell are cherished in the memory and never age. These pictures tell of this difference, they show peeling paint, faded photo wallpaper, weeds sprouting from joints. Something in the pictures has come to an end, and yet what it used to be always shines through.