SOMA

Skyscraper hotels with enormous parking fields, beaches of dredged-up sand, rows of beach chairs running for miles and dried out lawns surrounded by concrete. That is the standard landscape of vacation resorts like Gran Canaria. Gefeller (b. 1970) transformed this landscape into a cool, utopian stage set. His photographs are spatial and disorienting, as if they had been digitally manipulated. But they are real shots, albeit of unreal-looking tourist destinations. In his book Soma (2002) Gefeller combines the photographs with quotes from writers such as Aldous Huxley, Elias Canetti and Ray Bradbury.