How I Choose Locations for Landscape Photography Projects
A landscape project, for me, begins with a place, not a theme. I know this sounds simple, but the distinction governs everything that follows. A theme can be applied anywhere: water, memory, isolation, urban density. A location, chosen with care, already contains its own questions. My work has developed by listening to those questions rather than imposing a concept from outside. The projects gathered on this site (in Menorca, Andalucía, Seseña, Taiyuan and elsewhere) did not start as chapters in a master plan. They started as places that refused to remain incidental.
Location before concept
I do not arrive with a thesis and search for illustrations. I arrive, or return, to a territory and ask what condition it holds: pause, withdrawal, anticipation, regulation. The concept emerges from sustained contact. S'Enclusa was not initially conceived as a study of military memory or botanical reclamation. It was a site on an island I know, visibly in transition, that demanded repeated attention. Closed Island began from the experience of Menorca outside the tourist season, infrastructures present, function suspended. Origen responded to peripheral housing in Seseña, where architecture preceded the city itself.
Choosing location before concept keeps the work honest. If I selected places to fit a predetermined idea, the photographs would become demonstrations. When the place leads, the images carry evidence (spatial, material, temporal) that a viewer can read without my commentary. The concept, when it arrives, names what was already visible to anyone willing to stand still long enough. That is the difference between a project and a assignment.
Light and structure
Once a territory interests me, the practical selection of where to work within it follows two criteria I have used consistently: light and structure. In Andalucía, locations were chosen in advance, considering light, spatial balance and the specific conditions of each site. I did not wander at random hoping for encounters. I identified places where the land offered a compositional logic: where figure and environment could coexist without the human element dominating the frame.
Structure means more than geometry. It is the visible organisation of a place: how a river has been engineered, how a fairground repeats its forms across the island, how a quarry cuts into terrain, how building ratios shape a Tokyo district. I look for structure that reveals use, or the absence of use, without requiring explanation in the caption. Light completes the selection. On 4×5 colour slide film, tonal decisions are made at exposure. A location that reads well in concept but fails in the light of a given hour is not the right location that day. Large format teaches patience with both place and conditions.
These criteria are not romantic. They are functional. A project that will become a series of large prints, approximately 120 × 100 cm in my practice, must survive scale. Detail, proportion and the relation between elements in the frame must hold when the image occupies a wall. Location selection is therefore also print selection: I choose places that will remain legible at size, not only striking at first glance.
Return visits
A location chosen once is a photograph. A location chosen repeatedly is a project. I return to sites because the first visit establishes only a preliminary reading: what is obvious, what is visible under favourable light, what the place offers before you understand its rhythm. Return visits reveal change: vegetation advancing through a military wall, a tourist infrastructure empty in winter, a river at a different level after intervention.
Menorca, where I was born and where several projects converge, is the clearest example. S'Enclusa, Closed Island, Walking Around, Series Genets, different questions, shared territory. I did not plan that concentration. Menorca is a place I know across seasons and years, and knowing it means returning without the urgency of discovery. Return removes the pressure to conclude. It allows a location to become a project at its own pace, sometimes over months, sometimes over years.
I have written elsewhere about what repetition changes in the work itself. Here I emphasise what it changes in selection: you stop choosing places for novelty and start choosing them for depth. A site that rewards a second visit will usually reward a twentieth. That is the location worth committing film to.
Menorca, Andalucía, Taiyuan
Three places illustrate the method across different geographies. Menorca is intimacy and duration: an island read through pause, military withdrawal, seasonal closure, repeated forms. Closed Island observes the territory outside tourist season, when infrastructures remain but function is inactive. Enclusa observes permanent release: a base abandoned, reclaimed by growth. The island taught me that location and time are inseparable: the same ground reads differently in summer and in winter, in use and in rest.
Andalucía extends the method to open land and encounter. Locations selected for light and balance; portraits made with individuals found on site, integrated without staging. The place still leads. The figure enters the frame because the spatial composition allows it, not because a theme demanded a human presence.
Taiyuan River, in China, applies the same discipline to unfamiliar ground. The Fen River runs through the city as a constructed axis, reservoirs, controlled vegetation, infrastructure posing as landscape. I did not choose Taiyuan because I sought a project about China. I chose a river whose condition was readable: managed, visible, suspended between control and everyday use. Abroad or at home, the question is identical: does this place hold a question I can pursue through multiple exposures, not just one?
When a place becomes a project
There is no fixed threshold. A place becomes a project when the initial photographs suggest a sequence rather than an exception: when the next visit feels necessary rather than optional. Enclusa reached thirty-six images, each titled with a plant name in Latin and Menorquín. That scale was not planned at the first exposure. It grew because the site kept offering unresolved readings. Other projects remain shorter. Length is not the measure. Coherence is.
Not every strong location becomes a named project on the site. Some produce a handful of sheets that belong within a wider body of work. Living in the United States, Germany and China before settling in the Basque Country expanded my sense of what a territory can ask, even when the result is not immediately published as a series. Selection is continuous: a filter applied across years, not a single decision made in advance.
If you are choosing locations for your own landscape work, I would suggest starting where you can return, not where you will visit once. Look for structure that reveals condition, light that holds at the hour you can work, and a question the place poses before you pose one to it. The projects on my home page are the record of places that passed that filter. The Field Notes are the record of why some of them demanded words as well as film.
Manuel Pinar