Txema Salvans’s *The Waiting Game II* (RM, 2018) returns to the desolate yet inhabited landscapes of the Spanish Mediterranean, shifting the project’s human focus from the prostitute at the centre of the first volume to the fisherman. These figures appear at reservoirs and marshes, beside riverbanks, and in port towns by the sea. Their activity is quiet, repetitive, and suspended in time: fishing becomes both an occupation and a way of remaining elsewhere, outside the house.
The book’s significance lies in the way this second series revises the apparent subject of its predecessor. Rather than treating prostitution as an isolated social theme, Salvans places it within a broader meditation on waiting—on endurance, withdrawal, and the forms of life that gather around prolonged anticipation. The fishermen’s patience and resilience allow them to merge with widely different environments, making landscape and human presence inseparable in the photographs.
As a photobook, *The Waiting Game II* is therefore best understood as a continuation that also changes the terms of the original project. Its coastal and inland settings, recurring figure, and restrained premise create a study of waiting as both personal condition and social ritual. For collectors, the volume is of particular interest as a concise, self-contained development of Salvans’s larger project, and as a collaboration involving the photographer, David Campany, and Gaby Martinez. Published in English by RM, the 96-page hardcover presents this sustained inquiry in a substantial 25.15 × 33.27 cm format.