The Palace Hotel in Portorož is a site to which a personal relationship has existed since 1959. This subjective closeness generates thoughts about time, change and exemplary beauty. An approach to such thoughts can be given essayistic, but above all photographic form. This case is not a matter of peinture trouvée, as the photography is directed not solely to the structure of the image but equally to the subject. The images are photographic impressions that attempt to illustrate what lies behind.
In the late 1950s, communist Yugoslavia began to open up to western tourists. For this, the Palace Hotel in Portorož was awakened from its long slumber. In 1959 offers that would be described today as bargain or get-to-know holidays were made there to travellers. Tourists from the lower middle class, who could not even afford a mid-range hotel elsewhere, immersed themselves in the atmosphere of this palatial hotel dating from 1911, which seemed not even to have been aired since the days of the Habsburg monarchy. In the 1960s, mass tourism to Yugoslavia began, and reached Portorož in the north of the Istria peninsula. The Palace Hotel now underwent intensive commercial use, and appeared in the travel brochures of that time as the landmark of Portorož. The building survived these years, and was finally restored to its original purpose as a luxury hotel by the Kempinsky hotel group.
To return to the Palace Hotel after a gap of exactly 60 years is to experience distance. Whereas a week-long package holiday there cost a total of only 100 deutschmarks, today the prices of accommodation in the hotel are beyond the reach of most people. The hotel maintains its distance. Yet the view from outside suffices. It is known that the interior of the building was completely gutted. Nothing would remain as a reminder of 1959, let alone of the old Austrian monarchy. Of the original building, only the façade is preserved. However, here the façade is not the exterior, but the substance.
The Palace Hotel was built on the eve of the First World War with the aim of creating something beautiful – or to be more precise, something with the beauty of paradise. Its beauty was intended to be in line with consensus. The hotel was therefore not built in the style of the day, but according to the taste of the day, in a historical style that had long been obsolete but clearly still met expectations of beauty. The building is well-proportioned. It still appears charming today. What appeals to us is not necessarily the architecture as beauty but the place, the ambience, in which we are pleased to spend time. Added to this are the trees, which have turned out as they were probably envisaged a hundred years ago. Thus today we find a perfect image for the myth associated with the terms “Belle Époque” and “grand hotel”.
Thus we have come full circle. The Palace Hotel, in its cyclical history, has arrived where it originally wanted to be. It displays to us an image of beauty for which we have remained receptive. The reasons for this seem not to be aesthetic but rather psychological. The Palace Hotel lives up to an idea that we love.