Aftersun is a small sample of Pol Viladoms’ obsession with abandoned architectures and with construction and urban planning models linked to tourism development.
Excerpt from the text by Beatriz Escudero, included in the book.
Viladoms is an architect and a renowned architectural photographer, who has taken all the photographs with a Hasselblad medium-format square film camera.
Among them, water parks stand out, to which he has dedicated fifteen years of travel, research, and exploration.
This pursuit has led the author to cover increasingly greater distances: from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic, and from there to the Cretan Sea, reaching as far as the coasts of Japan and California, visiting more than 50 locations.
Linked to sun-and-beach tourism, water parks began to populate Spanish coastline during the 1980s and 1990s, offering new sources of hyperbolic entertainment close to the sea. They emerged as an extension, an orthopedics added to nature itself, designed to suit a type of tourism consumption that is ultimately an extractivist way of exploiting a territory—turning the landscape into another product, consumable and disposable.
The lack of planning and analysis led to overconstruction and the subsequent premature closure and abandonment of many of these parks, caused in part by competition and by the shift toward more sustainable and “authentic” tourism consumption.
Accompanying the photographs are fragments of images taken from postcards of the water parks themselves collected over the past few years. Through their forms, colors, and motifs, these compositions establish a new temporal dialogue with the author’s own work and nostalgically bring these spaces back to life, while also taking us back to our childhood memories—transporting us to that fleeting moment of happiness and shared play, turned into a propagandistic lure for the next visitor.
Facts & Credits
Title Aftersun
Typology Photobook
Dimensions 20 × 25 cm
Contents 41 original photographs and 28 colour postcard images
Pages 116
Publication Date June 2025
Photography Pol Viladoms
Publisher Ediciones Posibles
Edited by Alex Llovet and Pol Viladoms
Text (Spanish and English) Beatriz Escudero
Dust Jacket Design Requena Office
Book Design and Layout Beltimorestudio.net