Twenty photographic prints on archival cotton rag paper
Dimensions: 30 x 40cm
2014
Texas Hollywood is a photographic series created across three former Western film sets near Tabernas, Spain; Mini-Hollywood, Western Leone, and Texas Hollywood. These sites have since been repurposed as tourist attractions, blurring the line between cinematic myth and historical spectacle.
Each image is cropped in cinematic aspect ratios (4:3 and 16:9) yet printed at a small, documentary-like scale, echoing the familiarity of tourist ‘snapshots.’ The photographs capture landmarks, façades, and landscapes in ways that simulate scenes from films—copies of copies, emphasising the uncanny persistence of the Western myth in both popular culture and tourism.
By framing these pseudo-historical sites as touristic stills, the series highlights cinema’s transience, its lingering afterlife in the built environment, and the way myths of the American West circulate far beyond their original geographies. Texas Hollywood situates itself within a lineage of both frontier photography and contemporary re-photography, engaging with the Western not as a stable genre but as a travelling mythology—constantly reconfigured, endlessly replayed.