Beneficio is a documentary portrait of Spain's largest off-grid community, established in 1992 in a remote valley in Andalucía. Photographed and recorded by Ed Gold in October 2025, the book brings together portraits, observations of homes and landscape and first-person testimonies from people who have chosen to make their lives there.
Residents speak in their own words about freedom, happiness, family, spirituality, work, money, sustainability and their reasons for stepping outside conventional society. Their accounts also reveal the contradictions and difficulties of communal life and a settlement that has changed substantially during more than three decades of existence.
Rather than presenting Beneficio as either utopia or escape, Gold allows its residents to construct a complex collective portrait of a community continually negotiating the relationship between individual freedom and living together. Photography and testimony are sequenced throughout the book so that neither functions simply as an illustration of the other: individual voices accumulate alongside the photographs to form a broader portrait of the place.
Beneficio was conceived as a complete photographic book in which image, testimony, sequencing and design work together to create the documentary narrative.
Fox Ash Press, 182pp, 21cm x 27cm, illustrated paperback, 2026
