This is a book of photographs of Europe, taken on travels around the continent in the last decade; but there are no snowy mountain peaks to be seen, or sun-drenched beaches, or grand cathedrals, or beautiful cities.

 

This is a book of mislaid landscapes: of places so familiar and prosaic that they are invisible, ignored, forgotten. The subjects of these photographs are not obviously beautiful.

 

But the photographs of them are. A pair of net curtains in a Polish flat spin a delicate web; portentous storm clouds hang over an empty theme park in Ibiza; and a lone child contemplates a bouncy castle in Glasgow. Winter trees surrounded by flats in the Ukraine become an enchanted forest. Lamp posts and overhead cables at a motorway roundabout dance to an elegant choreography; a motorway flyover has the awesome power of an ancient monolith, and, reflected in a puddle, a block of council flats shimmers in the breeze.

 

The images in this book embrace the banal, the mundane and the plain boring, and out of these every day subjects, they conjure humour, melancholy, and magic.



Edward Hollis