Blister in the sun …
In this image from Jan Jedlička’s new photobook 200m, sunshades and loungers become sentinels on the sands. The closed canvas umbrellas recall the silhouettes of standing stones erected by prehistoric sun worshippers. Yet, while they seem to march on for ever towards the horizon line, they are plainly the opposite of millennia-old monuments, built to survive little more than the rough and tumble of a summer holiday. It is unclear if this is the beginning of a day of sunbathing crowds, or the end of the season.
Shifting sands …
Indeed, while they were created between 2008 and 2015, it is hard not to view the Czech landscape photographer’s shots of vast expanses of depopulated beach, a lonely basketball court or an empty car park through a coronavirus lens.
The lonely sea …
This is Principina a Mare, an idyllic seaside resort by the unspoilt Maremma Natural Park in Tuscany. The area is usually a low-key but chichi getaway for wealthy sun-seekers, but this year will presumably be as empty as it is in Jedlička’s series.
Here today …
Spend some time with his vision of the near-deserted Tuscan beach and its surroundings, though, and the effect is less calamitous than bittersweet. A tangle of footprints in the sand or a child’s bucket abandoned at the water’s edge are testament to fleeting good times in the face of natural cycles of constant change.
Square root …
Even the method used by the photographer suggests the shortfall between human order and the unruly elements. While each image is created according to specific rules – square, black-and-white and taken with a range of no more than 200m – the variety they capture is infinite.
Jan Jedlička’s 200m is published by Steidl
