The beautiful Canary Islands are packed with fascinating wildlife. Whales, lizards and lobster are all to be found in abundance, and that’s just the British tourists. Every year visitors from other European countries such as Germany and Russia join the throngs of UK holidaymakers in a mass migration to the beach resorts of Gran Canaria, Tenerife, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, driving all other civilised lifeforms out with aggressive mating displays, primitive dancing and regurgitation rituals.
German photographer Oliver Weber lives and works on the Canary Island of La Gomera, God help him, and has put together a collection of images, Social Life at Beach, which is part natural history study, part photo essay. The motivation for the series, being shown through online photography magazine Emerge, is a grim fascination with how some people choose to spend their holidays – the repetitive cycle of beach activities, buffet gorging, binge drinking and toilet hugging. Weber’s overriding question seems to be “why do people do this to themselves?”. He has a point. The collection is also available as a book from Amazon.
