Gerry Johansson / Spanish Summer

‘My first encounter with the Spanish landscape was in the late eighties. I had been photographing for a couple of days at a winery north of Madrid and had a week for myself to drive around in the countryside. I was completely unprepared for the beauty of the landscape, the traditional architecture and the presence of religious expression ... in the Spanish landscape you are likely to find cultural traces going a thousand years back.’ Gerry Johansson

‘Gerry Johansson‘s photobooks [are] unique experiences, quite unlike most of what is going on in the world of contemporary photography. Everything about them feels extremely carefully considered, yet there is a lightness to them that is quite rare.’ Conscientious

Over more than three decades, Gerry Johansson has brought his shrewd and sensitive eye to bear on peripheral landscapes the world over, from Ulan Bator to Antarctica. Spanish Summer sees him return to one of the first places that captured his imagination: the plains of central Spain. The chapel remained etched into Johansson’s memory and, decades later, led him to return and rediscover the country’s architectural heritage, religious significance, and beauty. With these images, a survey is conducted of a landscape into which thousands of years of cultural traces have bedded down. Johansson’s exacting composition and delicate black-and-white tonalities reveal a transient territory in which telephone wires transcend hoary crucifixes, modern plaster meets timeworn stone, and the shadows of industrial megaliths reach blindly across the dust.