In the Spanish West

There are places that seem familiar long before we arrive there.

An empty highway cutting through an arid plain. A solitary gas station. A weathered billboard. Telephone poles receding towards a distant horizon. These are images we recognise almost instinctively, not because we have necessarily travelled through them, but because they have become part of a shared visual vocabulary. Through photography, cinema and popular culture, the landscape of the American West has come to represent far more than a geographical region. It has become an idea—a mythology of distance, solitude, freedom, possibility and decline.

Yet myths rarely belong to a single place.

For much of the twentieth century, Spain played an unexpected role in constructing this mythology. The deserts of Almería, the high plains of Aragón and the empty roads of Castile became convincing stand-ins for Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Entire versions of the American West were imagined, filmed and exported from Spanish soil. The landscape did not simply imitate America; it helped invent the cinematic language through which America itself came to be seen.

This history raises an intriguing question. If our understanding of the American landscape has been shaped as much by representation as by geography, where does America really exist? Is it found in a particular nation, or in a collection of images that continue to circulate long after their origins have dissolved?

The photographs in In the Spanish West emerge from this uncertainty.

Made across central and southern Spain, they depict landscapes that exist in a state of quiet ambiguity. There are roads that seem to lead nowhere, industrial edges fading into open country, isolated buildings, mountains, plains and fragments of infrastructure suspended beneath immense skies. They are recognisably Spanish, yet they often appear to inhabit another visual tradition altogether. Their familiarity is inherited rather than literal.

The work does not attempt to disguise Spain as America. Instead, it explores the space between the two: the territory where memory, cinema and photography overlap. It asks how landscapes acquire meaning through repetition, and how photographs inherit the visual histories of other photographs. Every image carries traces of those that came before it. We rarely encounter a landscape innocently; we see through accumulated layers of cultural memory.

Photography has long played a central role in shaping the mythology of the American landscape. From documentary accounts of migration and hardship to the expansive road journeys of the post-war period, photographers established an enduring iconography of the open road, the frontier and the peripheral spaces that came to define an American imagination. These images were never merely descriptive. They transformed ordinary places into symbols, turning geography into narrative.

The landscapes in this body of work occupy a similar threshold. They resist dramatic events or picturesque spectacle. Instead, they linger on absence, stillness and waiting. The spaces are often empty, but not vacant. They seem to anticipate a story while withholding its arrival. Their silence becomes a way of reflecting on the images we expect to find there.

If the American West has always been, in part, a photographic and cinematic invention, then perhaps it has never been confined to America at all. Perhaps it has always existed wherever certain combinations of light, space and distance allow us to recognise its presence.

In the Spanish West is not a search for America in Spain. It is an exploration of how photography constructs places we believe we already know, and how landscapes continue to perform identities that were, from the beginning, acts of imagination.