Usually, when we think of motels, the common imagination leads us to visualize hotels located along American highways crowded with fugitive criminals or one-night stands, where someone always dies and blood ends up on the upholstery of the 1960s. That’s not really the case, at least not always.
American photographer Kurt Hollander has decided to make a photographic reportage called Happy City, which tells the story of Santo Domingo’s motels in a romantic way.

The shots taken at motels built between car repair shops, gas stations, and parks on the outskirts of cities in the Dominican Republic give the work an almost empty and mysterious sense. Kurt Hollander, who spent four days taking the pictures, captured the exterior of the structures. The photographs were taken at dawn or dusk and without people in the frame. This choice aims to accentuate the emptiness of this architecture of desire, leaving the viewer free to imagine what happens behind closed doors. A sort of “pull it off” effect.

Bright, bold signs adorn some of the motels, whose names include Obsession, Te Javi, Cariño and Happy City – from which the series is named. Each motel has a different design, ranging from ornamental buildings to those that resemble small villages. Although they were all built at the same time and funded by many of the same Chinese investors, each is a sumptuous tribute to a different architectural style.