Why I Photographed the Enclusa Project
I first knew Menorca as a working island. I began my professional life there as a photojournalist for Última Hora, moving through towns and coastlines with a camera that answered to the rhythm of the news. That experience taught me to read a place quickly, to recognise what mattered in the moment. But it also left me with a question I could not resolve in a single frame: what happens to a landscape when urgency disappears, when a site is no longer needed and time is allowed to move at its own pace?
S'Enclusa held that question for me. On the north of the island, the former United States military communications base had operated from the 1960s until the 1990s. When it was abandoned, the structures did not vanish. They remained (fences, buildings, surfaces built for control) while something else began to work on them. Vegetation moved in. Walls softened. Paths that once served a precise function became uncertain. I was drawn to that transition not as a document of military history, but as a condition of the landscape itself: a place where human intention and natural process were visibly negotiating with each other.
What attracted me was not spectacle. The site was quiet. The light on Menorca has a particular clarity, dry, direct, unforgiving, and in S'Enclusa that light fell on surfaces that no longer belonged to anyone. I returned again and again, not to collect images but to observe how the balance shifted. At first I looked at the barracks in a typological way, as repeated forms within a controlled environment. Gradually, my attention moved elsewhere. The architecture became secondary. What held the frame was growth, plants threading through concrete, colour accumulating where function had been erased.
That shift defined the project. I was not interested in illustrating abandonment as a theme. I wanted to photograph the moment when a landscape stops obeying its original purpose and begins to compose itself anew. Control and decay coexist there, but neither term feels sufficient alone. There is a third state (unstable, provisional) in which structure and vegetation share the same ground. That is what I tried to hold in the camera.
The process matched the subject. I work with a 4×5 large format camera on colour slide film. It is a slow instrument, and S'Enclusa demanded that slowness. Each exposure required me to stay with a place long enough for its details to rearrange themselves in my perception, for the wind to move a branch, for a shadow to cross a wall, for me to understand whether the frame belonged to architecture or to the plant growing against it. Large format does not forgive haste. It asks for decisions about perspective, depth and tonal range that cannot be corrected later. In a site defined by gradual transformation, that discipline felt necessary.
Working on slide film also shaped how I thought about the finished work. The project was conceived for large-scale prints: images that would occupy physical space and allow a viewer to enter the surface slowly, as I had entered the site. I digitised the negatives at maximum resolution, but the origin of the work remains analogue: one sheet of film per observation, one moment chosen from hours of waiting. Over time the series grew to thirty-six photographs. Each title names a plant appearing in the image, in Latin and in Menorquín: a way of acknowledging that the living element in the frame was not decoration but subject. Jose Antonio Fayos, a biologist, helped me understand what I was looking at. His knowledge grounded the work in the specific ecology of the island rather than in a generic idea of ruin.
S'Enclusa belongs to a way of working that has stayed with me across other projects and other countries. I am interested in territory as something observed over time, not as a backdrop for a single dramatic picture, but as a field of slow change. Landscape, for me, is never purely natural. It carries memory, use, absence. When I photograph a quarry, a river, a stretch of Andalusian ground, I am asking related questions: what has this place been asked to do, and what remains when that request ends? The Enclusa project was where I learned to phrase that question in visual terms.
I did not set out to make a definitive statement about Menorca or about military history. I set out to stay with a place until the photographs reflected its condition honestly, neither mourning the past nor celebrating nature's victory, but observing an equilibrium that could shift again. That attitude is what connects this work to everything that followed: a practice built on return, on patience, and on the belief that a landscape reveals itself only to sustained attention.
The complete series, S'Enclusa, is available on this site. These field notes are a space to write about what the images alone cannot say: the reasons behind the work, and the process that produced it.
Manuel Pinar. Menorca, 2009