Boring photos
The opening photo is the only one in this whole gallery that I think is actually worth anything. I took it before coming to Lanzarote: I stepped out of the house, the light hit those plants in a way I liked, I snapped the picture and kept walking. It wasn’t prepared, I didn’t wait for anything special to happen… The moment was just there, I saw it, and that’s what came out.
As I mentioned in the previous post, Lanzarote is paradise if you want to live or visit — but not if you’re after the kind of photography that interests me. There are basically three types of places here: where the locals actually live (where I’m living now), where the tourists stay, and the famous spots tourists go to visit.
Last time I showed you what the first kind looks like. Today it’s the second one: yesterday I went to one of those tourist residential zones, a small seaside town. It’s basically a theme park made of hotels, apartments and every kind of little business that feeds off them — all watching their customers get replaced every week so the whole hospitality and entertainment cycle can start over again. The island’s economy depends almost entirely on this system, and the authorities put huge effort into making sure visitors feel comfortable and leave with a nice, pleasant experience they’ll want to tell their friends about.
And that very “industrial perfection” is exactly what inevitably poisons what I’m trying to do as an unintentional photographer.
Below are some shots from yesterday’s walk, from mid-afternoon until I got back after dark. Almost everything is the same clichés we’ve all seen a thousand times and that I find completely uninteresting… but that’s what’s here. The next fifteen years are going to feel very long.
