Imagine a place. What do you see? The landscape, the people, the houses? Do you see something that is already in the process of vanishing?

Since 2011, photographer Ole Brodersen has been working to capture the forces that slowly shape small places – whether they come from nature, people or their absence. Lyngør, a car-free outport on the southern coast of Norway, serves as a backdrop. It offers an example of a common issue: What happens to places that lose their function? And what do we lose when diversity is smoothed out? Through this lens, the project opens up broader questions of cultural preservation, identity, and the tension between heritage and modernization in contemporary Europe.

Photographs and texts combine to open up a space for reflection about what such places mean to us, both locally and universally. The book contains contributions from Johan Harstad, Simen Tveitereid, PhD Dag O. Hessen, PhD Håkon Haugland and Simon Bainbridge, who offer different perspectives on what places can be and how they can be preserved.