Thursday, 20 November 2025, 15:20
Forty-six images by German photographer Robert Holder make up a new temporary exhibition at the Nerja Museum on the eastern Costa del Sol. ‘A Vision of Nerja’ depicts life in the town during the 1960s and can be viewed from its opening on Thursday 20 November at 8pm, until Tuesday 6 January in the Ana María Márquez room. Admission is free.
The photographs in the exhibition have been reproduced from the original negatives that Robert Holder kept in his personal archive. These are mostly 6 x 6 centimetre photographic films, a classic square format in analogue photography of the era and some 35mm, the standard that became popular for lighter cameras and in photojournalism.
Only two images are in colour, both related to fishing and the rest of the exhibition is presented in black and white, with images that depict daily life in Nerja at the time: children playing, housewives, the hustle and bustle of the market, work in the fields and at sea and also snapshots of local festivals.
Robert Holder was an amateur photographer born in Stuttgart in 1941, although it was in his blood as his father was a press photographer and his maternal grandfather worked in this profession at the Bavarian royal court. In fact, it was thanks to his father’s request for images of Nerja to publish in the German press that Holder began photographing the town, faithfully reflecting Nerja society in the 1960s and ’70s.
Holder settled in Nerja after traveling throughout Europe, driven by his fondness for Mediterranean countries and by chance when he was offered a partnership in some tourist apartments they wanted to promote in Germany. He spent the rest of his life between Nerja and Frigiliana, where he died in 2022 at the age of 81.
The photographs have been loaned to the museum by lawyer Pablo Rojo, a member of the Frigiliana Taha cultural association, who has written several books that have established him as a leading local historian, including ‘Historia insólita de Nerja’, (an unusual history of Nerja), in which he dedicates a chapter to Holder.