Txema Salvans: The Waiting Game

Gathering a series of photographs taken by Txema Salvans (born 1971) over the course of six years, The Waiting Game documents the exercise of prostitution along the highways of Spain€s Mediterranean coast. Disguised as a surveyor, Salvans photographed prostitution with an emphasis on the decidedly unerotic quality of its actual environs: the intersections, roundabouts, dead-end streets and shoulders of the road. The photographs in this book present the solitary figure of the waiting woman as a stereotypical image of objectified sexuality, in a landscape that is both striking and tragic. Exploring the varied and often surprising gamut of human longings and behaviors, Salvans achieves a balance of sociological dissection and naturalistic narration, and presents the image of the prostitute as an almost impersonal component of a larger mechanism.