Mallorca, Quietly

Mallorca has a reputation problem entirely of its own making. Decades of package tourism, sangria in buckets, songs about naked hairdressers—there’s a whole industry devoted to confirming that the island is essentially a German suburb that got confused and ended up in the Mediterranean. Which is one version of it. The other version is what French photographer Quentin de Briey found when he went there with a woman named Steffy and stayed off the main routes.

De Briey’s photographs appeared in Purple, the biannual French journal that Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm launched in 1992 and which has maintained, across three decades, a particular mix of fashion, fine art, and barely explained sensuality. A Purple photo series tends to look like it happened rather than was produced—low pressure, ambient light, the subject in on something. De Briey’s Mallorca work fits that register entirely.

What he found was the western interior of the island: empty paths through the hills, rocky coastline before it becomes a beach, small fincas with food and wine and no view of a pool bar. Steffy moves through these landscapes with the ease of someone who arrived earlier than the photographs suggest. The gardens, the heat, the fruit. The blue water accessed through stone. The images are gentle in a way that has nothing to do with softness—they just give the place room to be itself.

The work makes a simple argument: that a place’s reputation is mostly irrelevant to the place itself. Mallorca didn’t ask to become shorthand for package-tour embarrassment, and it doesn’t particularly care. The cliffs and the light and the figs on the tree are doing their own thing. You just have to get far enough from the airport to find them.