Coastal destinations are the favorites in Spain and Portugal for summer vacations and the beach, the place of enjoyment par excellence.
During the opening period of the Franco’s dictatorship imposed slogan “Spain is different” to promote tourism of “sun and sand”. It was about controlling everything, also defined what the postcard should be, thinking seducing the tourist.
Those visual codes have endured to the present day. Today we still say “it looks like a postcard” when faced with a landscape that seduces us. Just as the tourist gaze is a selective gaze, the postcard –and any photograph – also fragments reality.
Sund and Sand is a project to reflect about the use of beach space, about the transformation of a limited space in a kind of room with a view. These “anti-postcards” questions whether the beach is as idyllic as we think. The photographs were taken during nine summers, along the coasts of Spain and Portugal (Mediterranean Sea, Cantabrian and Atlantic Ocean).
