Benidorm is where the British package holiday was, for a great many people, first tested. Rob Ball photographs the Spanish resort as it stands now, and his interest is not in decline and not in nostalgia. The town is still full of people spending a promise that was sold in the 1950s, and the pictures are made from inside that continuing present tense.

The subject is a juxtaposition the place has always staged: a flat, bright beach culture at ground level and a skyline of high-rises above it, two orders of ambition occupying one frame. Ball uses colour as structure rather than atmosphere. Pastel façades sit against neon; pink towels lie on sand; the backstreets fall into greys and browns where the postcard view thins out; sunburn supplies its own pinks and reds.

Hoxton Mini Press publishes the collection in hardcover, 112 pages, in 2025. The pages are large enough for architecture and crowd to register at once, which matters in work that would lose its point if the towers collapsed into pattern. Ball is the photographer throughout; the sequencing is his, and it keeps the beach and the buildings in one argument rather than treating them as a before and an after.

A collector’s reason to look closely has to do with the subject rather than with scarcity. The seaside resort, and the ways photographers have approached it, remains one of the longer-running threads in British documentary practice: a place where leisure, class and the economics of aspiration are legible on the surface. Ball’s Benidorm belongs to that line and extends it, asking how the holiday dream has changed while the appetite for it has not.