Salt Roads
Year
2025
Kind
Landscape
Place
Bay of Cádiz, Spain
Credit
Personal project
Film and camera
Kodak Portra 400, Mamiya 7
Three winters on the salt pans of the Bay of Cádiz, where the roads are made of what the sea leaves behind.
The salt works around San Fernando have been farmed since the Romans. Most are abandoned now, and the ones that still work are run by a few families who rake the ponds by hand at the end of every summer.
I went back three winters running, when the ponds are flooded and the light is low and white. The roads between the pans are built from packed salt and clay. They disappear every time the tide is high enough.
Made on film
Everything was made on a Mamiya 7 and Kodak Portra 400, overexposed by a stop so the whites stay soft. The prints in the exhibition are 50 by 60 centimetres.
Evaporation ponds from the hill above the works.
Salt crust on the dry bed, close to the ground.
The foreman's pickup, parked where it is every day.
Two rakers walking home along the dyke.
Raking the crust into rows at noon.
A barrow of coarse salt by the brine pond.
Flamingos at the far end of the lagoon.
The old jetty at blue hour. Nobody fishes from it now.
A scoop of grey salt, held out for the camera.
