Hotel
Lara Beach
Turkey, 2005

During the years in which Lara Beach near Antalya is rapidly being built up with new resorts, Hans Wilschut photographs a hotel complex at night. In the image, the building appears as a monotonous sequence of volumes, almost like a closed institution or prison complex. Only those who look longer will notice a sign of life in a single lit window: this is where the caretaker of the complex stays. It is precisely this detail that shifts the image. The photograph can be read as a commentary on a form of tourism in which visitors withdraw into enclosed resorts and barely come into contact with the culture of the country they have travelled to. The architecture of leisure here takes on an inverted meaning: not openness and encounter, but separation, control, and repetition. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Lara Beach develops into one of Antalya’s densest resort zones, driven by the rise of large scale all inclusive tourism and a rapid increase in hotel capacity in the region.