When I first started collecting photobooks, one of my first was Spomenik by Jan Kempenaers. It wasn’t so much the photographs that drew me in, it was the brutal and futuristic structures in the photographs. At the time,I didn’t know what or where they were and the book was quite enigmatic. I eventually learnt that the term is Serbo-Croatian/Slovenian for monument and that they are all located in the former Yugoslavia.

The whole subject then came back to me when my wife and I started planning a trip to the Balkans. It dawned on me that where we were going was the home of the Spomeniks. I dug the book out and mapped all the documented monuments onto Google maps. Many were in countries we were not going to visit (Serbia, Montenegro…) but quite a few were. We agreed that we would visit as many as many as were practical given that we were in a motorhome with a dog.

In the end, we visited eight. And this is the story of some of the photographs. Part 2 will follow shortly.

You can read the full article here.