Marcel Winatschek

The Other Mallorca

Mallorca is Germany’s seventeenth state—the running joke, at least, the island boiled down to sangria buckets and the worst version of German tourism, the kind of place that makes you dumb just thinking about it. RTL2 with beaches.

Then I saw some photographs by Quentin de Briey from a trip he took there, and the whole thing inverted. Empty paths through the landscape. Houses built into hillsides. The sea at some rocky end, just blue. Gardens growing. Real light. Fruit on trees. Nothing performing anything.

That’s the Mallorca these images caught—not the invented one, not the cliché, just the place sitting there the whole time before anyone made it stupid. You see work like that and the noise stops being real. It becomes background. What’s left is clean.

I haven’t been there. But looking at those photographs, I finally saw Mallorca as something other than a punch line—as an actual place someone could walk through and notice.