Before Gerry Johansson turned his camera on the edges of Ulan Bator or the ice of Antarctica, he was drawn to the plains of central Spain. A chapel seen decades ago stayed with him, and Spanish Summer is the result of his return: a sustained look at a landscape in which thousands of years of cultural traces have settled into the ground.

Johansson’s exacting composition and fine black-and-white tonalities give the book its temperament. Telephone wires cut across old crucifixes; modern plaster abuts timeworn stone; the shadows of industrial megaliths fall across dust. These are not picturesque ruins but a working terrain where the sacred and the infrastructural share the same horizon. The photographs record a transient territory, one that is neither purely historical nor wholly contemporary.

What distinguishes the project is its patience. Rather than isolate monuments, Johansson surveys the wider field—architecture, religious markers, and the ordinary fabric of the plain—so that each image accumulates into a larger reading of place. The sequence asks viewers to look at how meaning is layered into land over centuries, and how photography can register that sedimentation without forcing it into narrative.

Published by MACK in 2022, Spanish Summer is a 320-page hardcover, 17 by 24 cm, with a debossed linen cover and front and back tip-ins. For collectors of landscape photography and of photobooks as designed objects, the book’s scale and construction support the unhurried attention its subject demands. It belongs with Johansson’s long-running investigations of peripheral places, and it rewards the kind of slow looking that its images themselves require.