Laurence Stephens’s Bored Tourists, published by Hoxton Mini Press in 2018, turns the familiar holiday photograph into a study of anticlimax. Made across Spain and Portugal, the book observes travellers who have gone abroad expecting discovery yet appear bemused, disappointed, tired, or simply disengaged. Its subject is not travel in the grand sense, but the gap between the promise of cultural experience and the ordinary, uncomfortable reality of consuming it as a visitor.

The project began with a visit to Barcelona Cathedral and developed over three summers of photographing cultural landscapes. Stephens looks at the tourist in museums, before skylines, among monuments, and in the dense choreography of contemporary sightseeing. Selfie sticks recur as both object and visual punctuation: a concise emblem of the way experience is increasingly mediated, recorded, and performed. The resulting pictures are playful and colourful, but their humour is edged with an unsparing awareness of fatigue, repetition, and commercialised looking.

The square format gives the work a deliberate contemporary register, described as a subtle nod to the visual habits of the Instagram generation. That choice also suits the book’s democratic attention to small episodes: a posture, a blank expression, an obstructed view, or the awkward distance between a person and the spectacle they have travelled to see. Rather than seeking exceptional moments, Stephens builds meaning through accumulation, allowing the banal to become its own subject.

For collectors, Bored Tourists merits attention as a focused photographic project with a clearly defined social observation and a coherent visual premise. It is an English-language paperback issued by Hoxton Mini Press, identified with ISBN 9781910566367. Its appeal lies less in travel imagery than in its rethinking of tourist photography itself: an accessible, sharply edited account of how expectation, technology, and boredom shape the modern encounter with place.