Single - FotoSlovo 2026 - Category « Environmental and Climate issues »

Tarragona, my home city, has recently become a recurring port for massive cruise ships, a change that has deeply altered our urban and social landscape. To understand the impact of this phenomenon, a journalist and I embarked on a seven-night Mediterranean cruise, visiting every city on its route. While the initial goal was to document the tension between mass tourism and local heritage, the most disturbing revelation was the internal machinery of the cruise ship itself. This project, which hopefully will culminate in a non-fiction book, focuses on what lies behind the curtains of these floating cities.

The five images presented here are a concentrated extract of a much larger body of work. They capture the visceral friction between human excess and ecological exhaustion. Inside the ship, reality, time, and space seem to dissolve. My greatest challenge was documenting this chaotic environment with a non-discreet camera while attempting to remain unnoticed. I made a conscious decision to avoid showing faces, focusing instead on the anonymity of the masses and the physical traces of overconsumption.

The cruise industry is a nomadic system that burns immense amounts of fuel to sustain a bubble of cheap food, lots of alcohol and a promise to never get bored. My lens captured the grime beneath the glitter: the mountains of wasted food, the physical toll on bodies, and the black smoke constantly billowing from the funnels. I believe my fellow citizens need to see this hidden reality to truly understand what is visiting our shores. "Supposedly Fun" tries to be a wake up call for every politician and citizen that thinks this kind of tourism is beneficial for our cities.

The title of this project, and the somewhat reckless decision to embark on this journey, were inspired by David Foster Wallace’s satirical book: A Supposedly Fun Thing I´ll Never Do Again.