Memory and Territory in Landscape Photography
Memory, in landscape photography, is often treated as nostalgia: a longing for what the land used to be. I use the word differently. Memory, for me, is the trace of a purpose that has ended or paused: a military function withdrawn, a tourist season suspended, a city that has not yet arrived. Territory holds those traces visibly. The photograph does not restore the past. It describes what remains when use withdraws, and how the land reorganises itself in that interval.
Places after their purpose
Many of the landscapes I return to are defined by a function they no longer perform, or perform only intermittently. S'Enclusa, on Menorca, was a U.S. military communications base between the 1960s and 1990s. After abandonment, the site did not become empty. It entered a slow transformation, structures still standing, meaning already dissolved, vegetation advancing through the logic of neglect rather than design.
That condition interests me because it is readable without explanation. You do not need to know the history of the base to sense that the buildings belong to an order that no longer governs the place. The photograph can hold that tension: architecture persisting, authority absent. In the Enclusa project, I followed that transition over years, not as documentation of decline but as observation of a new equilibrium forming between control and decay.
A place after its purpose is not a ruin in the romantic sense. It is a territory in transition, still physically present, already semantically unstable. Large format film suits that instability. Each exposure asks whether the frame belongs to the structure or to what is overtaking it: a question that memory alone cannot answer, but that repeated visits gradually resolve.
Military, tourism, housing
Three pressures shape the projects I am describing here, though they appear under different names. Military use leaves hardened infrastructure and abrupt withdrawal. Tourism imposes a seasonal rhythm, presence and absence measured in months rather than decades. Housing expansion, driven by economic logic, builds form before context, architecture before city.
Closed Island observes Menorca outside the tourist season, when infrastructures remain but their function is temporarily inactive. The island shifts from destination to pause. Landscapes detach from expected use; absence allows the underlying structure to become visible. I photographed that condition in 2009, the same year as Enclusa, from the same island but with a different question. Enclusa asks what happens when a site is permanently released. Closed Island asks what happens when release is seasonal: when the territory breathes between one occupation and the next.
Origen, photographed in Seseña, belongs to another register of memory: anticipation rather than aftermath. Large-scale residential developments appear on the periphery before urban infrastructure arrives, isolated structures shaped by economic logic rather than social continuity. The buildings remember a future that has not yet happened. They stand as origin points of sprawl, defining a territory through absence of the city they were built to serve.
Military, tourism, housing: three modes of organising land. Each project reads one mode, but together they describe a consistent interest: how territory carries the memory of decisions made elsewhere, by institutions, markets or seasons.
Vegetation and pause
Natural growth appears throughout this work not as picturesque recovery but as an active force. At Enclusa, vegetation dissolves military meaning, barracks overtaken, paths narrowed, walls softened. The series eventually shifted from typological observation of abandoned structures toward a landscape in which plants became the dominant subject. Each of the sixteen photographs is titled with the name of a plant in Latin and Menorquín, acknowledging that the living element was not decoration but the agent of transformation.
Pause (seasonal or permanent) gives vegetation time to enter the frame. Closed Island records a different pause: not reclamation but latency. Tourist infrastructures without tourists, services without demand, spaces waiting for function to resume. The land is not being reclaimed; it is resting. That distinction matters. Reclamation implies a before and after driven by conflict or abandonment. Rest implies a rhythm. Both are forms of memory inscribed in the territory.
I do not photograph vegetation as symbol. I photograph it as evidence, of time, of withdrawal, of a place reorganising without human direction. The 4×5 camera, with its requirement to stay, aligns with that evidence. You cannot record the slow advance of ivy in a single hurried exposure. You return, and the frame changes because the place has changed, not because you have altered the file.
A consistent question across projects
Enclusa, Closed Island and Origen were not conceived as a trilogy. They emerged from different years and locations. Menorca twice, Seseña once, yet they orbit the same question: what does a landscape remember when its intended use falters? The answer is never purely historical. It is spatial, visible in proportion, material, light and the relation between built form and what surrounds it.
That question also connects these Spanish projects to work made abroad: managed rivers, regulated urban density, quarries shaped by extraction. Memory of use is not a local theme. Every territory carries the residue of decisions: political, economic, ecological. What varies is how quickly those decisions become visible, and how long the landscape takes to absorb or resist them.
Long-term observation is the method that allows the question to deepen. A single visit to S'Enclusa could produce striking images of ruin. Only return visits revealed that the site was not frozen in decay but actively becoming something else: a landscape whose identity was botanical as much as architectural. Closed Island required understanding Menorca across seasons, not as contrast but as rhythm. Origen required accepting that absence, of city, of services, of inhabitants, was the subject itself.
Writing vs. showing
These Field Notes exist because some part of the work resists caption alone. A photograph can hold memory of use without narrating it. Viewers bring their own associations, conflict, holiday, property speculation, and the image may confirm or quietly resist those readings. Writing allows me to name the question I am pursuing without closing the photograph's ambiguity.
I do not treat text as illustration of the image, or the image as illustration of the text. They are parallel forms of attention. The projects show what the territory offered at a given moment. The writing describes why I stayed, what changed between visits, how military withdrawal differs from tourist pause or from housing built before its city. If the work succeeds, a viewer can enter through either door: the wall or the page, and arrive at the same seriousness about place.
Memory and territory, finally, are not themes I select in advance. They are conditions I recognise after working. A site releases its function; I release my expectation of what the photograph should prove. What remains is the land as it is, temporarily closed, permanently transformed, or waiting for a future that may or may not arrive. The camera records that remainder. The long project gives it time to become visible.
Manuel Pinar