The big picture: Bronzing in Benidorm

It is, depending on your outlook, a vision of paradise or a jam-packed hell on earth. When Rob Ball took this photograph of Levante beach in Benidorm in July 2024, the sun was going down and the tide was coming in, narrowing the strip of sand between the sea and the skyscrapers. But the crowds lingered on, soaking up the rays in what Ball describes as “an act of communion, with all these people coming together and almost worshipping the sun”.

Benidorm has a bad rap. “There’s probably a very easy way to photograph the place where you find people who are overweight or sunburnt or drunk,” says Ball. But he wanted to show a different side to the Alicante resort, which he visited over the course of a year as part of his career-long fascination with coastal tourism, the fruits of which are currently on view in a retrospective in central London.

When Ball photographs resorts such as Coney Island or Whitstable, where he lives, he’s interested in them less as an opportunity to capture debauchery than a way of understanding how the seaside is shaped for our entertainment. Benidorm is a particularly intensive example: a sleepy fishing village which in the 1950s and 1960s was transformed into a package-holiday magnet, dense with skyscrapers. It had 2.7 million visitors in 2023, nearly a third coming from the UK. Ball calls it “the birthplace of the mass tourist resort”.

Some photographers might have taken an anthropological approach, but Ball didn’t feel all that separate from the tourists he encountered. He has fond memories of going to the Pontinental hotel in southern Spain as a child – “being from a working-class family,” he recalls, “I felt very lucky to go.” He brought that perspective to his work in Benidorm. “It’s very hard to be judgmental when you’re seeing people enjoying themselves. And often it’s working-class people who probably work quite hard and get three or four weeks off a year. It mightn’t be what I want to do for my holidays,” he says, “but I really enjoyed being there. I came away as a real advocate for Benidorm.”

Rob Ball: Everything Beautiful is Far Away is at LBF Contemporary, London W1, until 28 May