Her story
Leyla is twenty-seven. Only her grandmother uses the whole name, and only when she's cross; in Austria the von has been forbidden since 1919, and in Barcelona it is just long. She writes for small hotels on the Mediterranean and lives in Gràcia, in a flat whose balcony faces the wrong way. Her father's family kept a house on the Attersee whose roof leaks into the ballroom. Her mother is from Shiraz.
Last summer she went down the coast, Barcelona, Menton, Cap-d'Ail, Camogli, and wrote to her grandmother Lotte from every place she slept. The letters are honest about the light, the lemons and the sea. They are less honest about the man who took her photographs, whose name she never writes down, and about the lines she crossed out, which her grandmother reads first.
This winter her brother wants to sell the house, the man she is with now hasn't read a page, and a blue envelope has come from the lake with one line in it: Come in December. There is something to discuss.
The project
Cartas del verano is a serial story, told the way people tell their lives now: in letters, photographs and posts, a little every week. It began with a question: what would a family look like if you could follow it the way you follow a stranger online, and slowly realise it has secrets? The letters are written and rewritten like chapters. The photographs are made with AI and finished by hand to look like film. The places are real, and every fact in every letter is checked. The people are not.
What's real
- The places. Every letter is set somewhere you can go.
- The facts in the letters, which are checked.
- The maker, named in the Imprint.
What's not
- Leyla, her family and everyone around them.
- Every photograph of a person on this site.