Between Potato Fields and Photochemistry: A German Makes Sa Pobla Visible

Between Potato Fields and Photochemistry: A German Makes Sa Pobla Visible

How a photographer gives northern Mallorca new perspectives with a book and a lab

When in the early morning the bakery at Plaça Ramón Llull sends the first scent of warm ensaimadas through the streets and the train to Palma whistles as it stops at Estación de Sa Pobla (see When Tracks Cross the Fields: Sa Pobla Pushes Back Against Rail Plans), that is the time when photographs are made that do not look like postcards. Right there, between fields, country roads and the hazy silhouette of the Serra de Tramuntana, photographer Christoph Höhmann has built a home and a small analog realm.

Höhmann, born in 1976 in Kassel, moved to northern Mallorca in 2019 after years in northern Germany. He was looking for distance from long days in front of a monitor and found it in the mix of quiet residential streets, good connections (motorway, bus and train) and proximity to Playa de Muro. What for many visitors is a backdrop, he uses as a workplace and a source of inspiration.

From hundreds of casual shots taken on the way to the supermarket, at the bus stop or on the way to friends, he shaped a book: ¡Viva sa Pobla!, self-published at the end of 2024. On roughly 140 pages it collects moments from everyday life: empty stretches of beach in the early morning, weathered facades, old cable runs on house walls and quiet streets that are often overlooked.

The book includes a small geographic index so the curious can see exactly where the pictures were taken. For Höhmann the book is more than nostalgia; it is a kind of inventory — a document of things that are changing or have already disappeared, including the recent Hail catastrophe in Sa Pobla: potato harvest on the brink.

What makes his work special: Höhmann operates the only analog photo lab in the area, opened in autumn 2025. The "Laboratorio Mallorca" is housed in premises provided by the municipality. There, negative times become tangible again — developer bottles, the red glow of the darkroom, the opportunity to physically enlarge images.

From the lab he offers workshops in Spanish, English and German. They are small groups, a maximum of four participants, which allows room for individual guidance. The intensive courses include developing black-and-white film (about 3.5 hours) and a subsequent enlargement session the next day that can take more than four hours. There are also offerings just for enlarging already finished negatives.

Further formats are planned: large-format cameras, glass plate workshops and pinhole camera projects — techniques that seem almost lost in digital times. Prices for complete workshops including materials are around 150 euros, pure enlargement offers at about 85 euros. For people who want to go deeper into photography, these are manageable entry barriers.

Höhmann remains open to exchange: he regularly travels to Palma to keep contact with the city’s art scene. At the same time he values the quiet hinterland. "Playa de Muro is often empty," he says, and it does not sound like vanity but like quiet happiness about the possibility of experiencing landscape without crowds.

The photographer's work shows a quiet love for the island: no myth, no romanticizing, but careful observation. Those who stroll through Sa Pobla hear tractors in the fields, see neighbors sitting by their doors and encounter corners where the morning light is so clear that it re-describes colors and textures — a gift for any camera, analog as well as digital.

For Sa Pobla and Mallorca overall, a project like this is valuable: it brings people together, enlivens spaces with exhibitions and courses and makes local places visible that would otherwise be easily overlooked. The lab is not just a workshop but a meeting place: for locals, newcomers and visitors who want to learn more about the island than just beach photos.

So if you want to feel real material in your hands again instead of quick likes, Sa Pobla offers an address. The small photo book and the lab are an invitation — to close looking, to touching and to lingering. In a landscape that is too often read merely as a backdrop, Christoph Höhmann reminds us that the everyday deserves attention.

In the end there remains a simple observation: when the first workers return from the fields and the road to Palma slowly fills with traffic again (see When the Rows Stay Empty: The Potato Crisis in Sa Pobla), somewhere in the lab someone sits in the red light of the darkroom and pulls an image from the developer bath — a moment that vividly demonstrates the value of analog work on Mallorca.