I have to confess that I disliked Ibiza more than almost anywhere I've visited. I found the scenery generally to be at best uninteresting (that cove, taken from my hotel balcony, was by far the most attractive vista I saw) and more commonly downright ugly. The whole island seemed to be geared solely to extracting as much money as possible for the most mundane things. The food was second rate and quite ludicrously expensive, with prices above what one might expect to pay for superb cooking in a metropolis such as London, drink was the same and loud music seemed inescapable.
The only bright spot was the prevalence of some very attractive girls, but discretion with the camera seemed wise: the men with them appeared a good deal larger than I am. Older, too, and I suspect wealthier.
I note that Chico Bialas doesn't have a lot of landscapes on his site.Jeremy
I take your point!
But, no, I see him (Bialas) as a fashion photographer above everything else; I have very litlle landscape either – it’s requires a different set of sensitivites, I think. What does appeal to me in his non-model work, is the gritty building stuff – the slight menace of dark religious symbolism he catches.
Ibiza is partyville, gaysville, drugsville and pretty much anything else at which many young people like to point their money and time. Though it’s a short hop away, I saw more of it before I came to live next door than in the thirty-one years since. It does/did boast a couple of very expensive boutique hotels and always pretty women, but it’s just physically too tight a pace for living: there’s nowhere to go if you want to stretch yourself for the day. Not to be too unkind about it, you tend to run into the very people you’d rather not meet in your own home town. Also, the medical services aren’t that great: when my wife was undergoing radiotherapy in Palma, five days a week for five weeks or more, a woman was there everyday with similar problems and she had to fly in from Ibiza ever single morning…
Food: we shot sets of hotels for several different holiday companes there; the hotel food was so bad that my wife refused to eat in them, even for breakfast: that meant unreasonably early starts and the gentle blowing of much of the profit!
If you are youngish, rich enough to live high and, better, have a boat, it’s worth a couple of weeks! But even then, the competition’s all around.
;-)
Rob C