Sander van Wettum photographs the southern European coast in winter, when the seasonal machinery of tourism has shut down. The hotels are closed, the bars shuttered, the beaches emptied of everything but furniture and weather. Eriskay Connection published this body of work in 2021 as a flexible hardcover of ninety-six pages, in a narrow 167 by 316 millimeter format that holds the horizontality of shoreline and the verticality of stacked balconies in a single, uneasy frame. It is a book about architecture as much as about absence: the buildings remain, but the reason for their existence has temporarily withdrawn.
The subject is the mass tourist development that reshaped these coastlines after the Second World War, and the interval in which those overbuilt strips lose their relation to the places that contain them. Van Wettum photographs during that interval, when the intended use of a space has dissolved and another reality becomes visible. His scenes are ambiguous enough that viewers are invited to project their own narratives and memories onto them, yet the book does not soften what it records. The consequences of mass tourism are present in every empty promenade and unlit lobby. The selection and sequencing matter here; a lesser edit would turn this into picturesque ruin, and this one does not.
The book is a collaboration as well as a photographic project. Van Wettum shares writing credits with Jan van Helden and Dave Richardson, Joy Phillips of The Language Collective edited the texts, and Rob van Hoesel designed the volume. The publisher’s list of contributors is complete, so no single name should be taken as responsible for everything between the covers. The texts, including Richardson’s fact-fiction contribution, sit beside the photographs rather than explaining them away.
For a collector, the interest lies in how the book holds two registers at once: the seductive vacancy of off-season resort architecture and the hard fact of what built it. The format, the design, and the mix of essay and fiction are integral to that effect, not incidental packaging. It is a considered object from a publisher known for treating the photobook as a designed whole.
