In this issue of QM, dedicated to the myths of the Mediterranean, we invite readers to engage with the singular gaze of photographer Toni Catany (Llucmajor, Mallorca) through La meva Mediterrània. While myths tend to freeze the Mediterranean into idealised images or simplified narratives, his work opens a different space: a plural, intimate and shifting Mediterranean, woven from geographical and emotional landscapes.
Catany himself articulated the key to the project as follows:
“I wanted, through images, to offer a personal version of a geographical and cultural space, complex and deeply engaging, which I consider my own. My vision of this space begins in the Balearic Islands, as if they were its centre. From the rooftop of my house in Llucmajor, looking south, one can see the island of Cabrera. I know that beyond lie other lands, the coast of Africa that invites me to dream…”
— Toni Catany
This “my” is not possession, but perspective. A concrete point of departure that shifts the centre and opens the map. That is why these images do not construct a geography of the Mediterranean; they construct an experience. There is no sea or blue horizon, no postcard or idealised narrative. There are bodies, walls, squares, worn interiors, gazes that hold time.
In La meva Mediterrània, Catany brings together a constellation of images taken over several decades in different parts of the Mediterranean — from Ibiza to Alexandria, from Naples to Bizerte, from Meknes to Istanbul or Cappadocia — without hierarchies or a single centre. Each photograph functions as an autonomous fragment, yet all share the same way of being in the world: attentive, restrained, profoundly human.
Solitary figures, children, men standing still in the street, almost empty interiors or squares crossed by everyday activity. Catany does not document; he observes. He does not explain; he lets the image breathe. The Mediterranean he presents is not an idealised myth, but a reality shaped by matter, time and presence.
In February 1991, the Casal Solleric in Palma inaugurated the exhibition “La meva Mediterrània”, which brought together this gaze forged through travel and diverse techniques, yet marked by strong aesthetic coherence. In the early 1990s, this work also took shape as the publication La meva Mediterrània (Lunwerg, 1990). Today, these photographs form part of the collection of the Fundació Toni Catany, which ensures their preservation and dissemination.
Within the framework of this issue devoted to the myths of the Mediterranean, the images do not close a narrative; they open one. And they ask of us the simplest and most difficult gesture: to look again.
