The Attentiveness of the Convert

To be a "weekender" is usually to be a transient — a person who quickly skims the surface of a city, collecting sights like postcards before retreating to the safety of the familiar. Lebled Soloviev Editions has always sought to go further with our Weekender travel series, getting behind the scenes of how it really feels to belong, enjoy, and understand a foreign place.

But in The Weekender Madrid, Charlotte Bergan Cioli turns the concept inside out to reveal a person of heightened awareness. Her state of mind is of someone who is seeking to belong, and who uses her lens both to bridge and document the gap between being a visitor and being a resident.

Born in Florida to a French mother and a Norwegian father, Charlotte grew up navigating the cultural seams between the United States, France, and Norway. "I always felt more European than American," she reflects, "despite the accent." This multicultural heritage has left her with a specific kind of internal compass: one that is always searching for home, but is acutely aware of the outsider-ness that comes with moving between worlds.

Having earlier shot The Weekender Paris, a city where she felt “very confident,” Bergan Cioli’s work in Madrid has a hesitation to it that is charming. “I'm a little bit more shy in my photography,” she agrees. By waiting for the city to invite her in, her sense of being more of an outsider here manifests not as a limitation but as a humility. Her images of Madrid are beautiful, with a haunting, tentative quality, as if she cannot quite believe her luck in landing here.

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Perhaps it is this approach that gives The Weekender Madrid its emotional weight. While a native Madrileño might walk past a heritage building or a tiny independent shop without a second glance, Charlotte approaches them with a devotional intensity. She moved to Madrid only two years ago, following a stint in Paris, and she remains in the effusive phase of a convert. She sees the texture of the city — the way the light hits a found facade in Malasaña or the quiet energy of a bookshop in Lavapiés — because she is still in the process of discovering them herself.

This unpretentiousness and sense of finding her feet is mirrored in her professional life. Bergan Cioli did not start her career in photography, but transitioned into it. She has spent a decade working in the logical, structured world of IT and although she has always found an outlet for her creative side, photography is a relatively new development, although one she has embraced wholeheartedly.

“I have at least six cameras,” she says, laughing, and goes on to list them and their various qualities with the zeal of a convert. One of them is her Voigtlander, which she has frankensteined with her father’s broken Leica. “I removed the lens from his camera and put it into a body so I can use it on this camera. It's not a lens that's sold on the market, it was (custom) made.”

This act of grafting — taking a piece of the past and fixing it upon the present — is a perfect reflection of Bergan Cioli herself. She is a Norwegian-French-American hybrid grafting her history onto the cityscape of Madrid.

Her methodology for finding the places she has documented is a blend of the digital and the tactile, the logical and the atmospheric. "I have a process of bookmarking," she says, describing how she and her husband “pick a new neighborhood and just wander” noting down businesses and spaces that catch her eye on Google Maps, to return to later for further exploration. She looks, she says, for "good energy.” This process has inexorably led to her “slowly falling in love with a new home.”

Like all the books from this collection, The Weekender Madrid is structured chronologically from Thursday to Sunday, mimicking the trajectory of a long weekend. But this isn't a checklist of monuments. It is an invitation to share in the ritual of settling in. We move from morning coffee on a rooftop terrace to the clatter of tapas in a taverna, from the stillness of waterlilies in Retiro Park to the silence of the Museo Nacional Thyssen. To shoot the places she selected for the book, Bergan Cioli even checked into a hotel as if she were a tourist, to ensure that she looked at Madrid with fresh eyes, unburdened by the blindness of the local.

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It is precisely this insistence on not-truly-belonging that makes her the perfect guide for the reader. She doesn't lecture from a position of authority; she invites us to be her accomplices in discovery. Because she is shy with her lens, she captures the intimate details that more confident photographers might miss: the curve of a chair, the specific shade of a tiled wall, the quiet dignity of a heritage shopkeeper.

Charlotte Bergan Cioli has created a book that is as much about the internal structures of belonging as it is about the architecture of Spain’s capital. Ultimately, The Weekender Madrid suggests that home is not something you are born into, but something you can earn, or learn through attentiveness. Through her composite lens, she shows us that when you look at a city with enough humility and enough love, it eventually stops being a tourist destination and starts being a place to park your heart — provided you are willing to walk, to wander, and to really look.