A Menorca Summer

Menorca in summer is a study in blue, and the study has rules. The island is the quiet sibling of the Balearics (flatter than Mallorca, slower than Ibiza, declared a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1993 before mass tourism could finish its sentence) and it enforces a certain pace on anyone photographing it. Things here do not happen quickly. The light changes, the wind changes, a goat repositions itself. That is the news.

These photographs were made across one summer, almost all on Kodak Gold 200, with a roll of Portra 160 saved for one specific job that will be obvious when it arrives. Gold is the correct film for the Mediterranean for an unglamorous reason: the sea here is so saturated that slide film tips it into postcard, and the postcard is a lie of enthusiasm. Gold keeps it honest: blue, but a blue you can believe.

The calas are the island's punctuation: small rocky coves cut into the limestone, each holding a pool of water so clear that boats appear to levitate on their own shadows. Cala Morell, Arenal d'en Castell, the unnamed ones reached on foot along the Camí de Cavalls, the old horse path that circles the entire island and delivers, every forty minutes or so, another aperture of turquoise between the pines.

The cliffs of the north coast are a different country: darker stone, bigger water, the tramuntana wind that bends everything woody into the same diagonal. The same film, the same afternoon, and the palette shifts a full season.

Most of these frames are of people in the water, because in July that is where the island's whole population is. Swimmers doing slow circuits of the cove, snorkelers patrolling the rocks, boys jumping from ledges in queues that self-organise by age and audacity. These are the same photographs every summer for sixty years (your grandparents are in a version of them somewhere) and that is exactly why they are worth taking. A photograph of a boy mid-dive is a document of one second in 2025 and simultaneously of every Mediterranean summer since swimming was invented.

The boy on the rocks spent twenty minutes deciding. The camera spent one frame on the decision and one on the jump, because at Gold 200 prices, that is the correct allocation.

On the cliffs of the northern coast the paragliders launch in the late afternoon, when the thermals come off the sea and the wind steadies. This was the Portra job. A wing against a clear sky is a thin, hard-edged subject: exactly what a fine-grained, low-contrast film holds onto and exactly what Gold smudges. They circle for an hour, silent, crossing in front of the sun, and then land in the scrub with a sound like a tablecloth being shaken out.

Inland the island changes register entirely, and the camera followed it there on the hottest days. Goats stand on cliff edges with no visible agenda. The famous Menorquín horses (black, compact, theatrical) graze behind dry-stone walls until festival season, when they rear on command in village squares. Alaior stacks its whitewash on a hill like crockery. And at the edges of all this, the other Menorca: a hidden house behind agaves, new developments pushing against the protected line, the permanent negotiation between an island that wants to stay a photograph and an economy that wants to sell it.

The interior is where Menorca stops performing for visitors, which is precisely when it is most worth photographing.

The light goes long after eight. The beaches empty by degrees, the sand cooling, and the people who remain all do the same thing without arranging it: they turn to face the sun going down, the way an audience faces a stage. The last exposures of the day take themselves. You meter for the sky, you accept that the figures will go to silhouette, and you spend the final frames of the roll on a horizon you have already photographed a hundred times, because the alternative is not photographing it, and no one with a loaded camera has ever managed that on this island.