In Brazil, where young people tend to live in pretty close quarters with mom, dad, and other members of their families until they get married, it isn’t easy to get some privacy with a romantic partner. But it’s possible—at “love motels.” These are sometimes-seedy, sometimes hilariously lavish sanctuaries for the sex-deprived.
The Dutch art director Vera van de Sandt had heard of these motels during her travels to Brazil. She was intrigued by all the shapes and sizes they came in, and wanted to see what they were like from the inside. In 2014, she read that some in Rio de Janeiro were being converted into boring old regular hotels for the 2016 Olympics. Before they were all gone, she and the photographer Jur Oster set off to document them.
They visited Rio and many other areas in the country in two trips in 2014 and 2015. With locals’ help, they found some really wacky motels that weren’t listed online. “You find motels everywhere, even in the smallest village,” van de Sandt says. ”They are easy to spot—mainly because of their names, which are often quite suggestive,” she adds. “We thought they were only meant for cheating and prostitution, but along the way we found out that the love motels meet a social need.” She and Oster posed as a couple to gain entry, and then captured the architecture and the interior decor of these buildings. They’ve compiled their images into a series called “Love Land Stop Time.”
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