Yet walk just a couple of miles up the long stretch of beach that fronts Kuta, leave behind the Bali-Bum westerners living out their pony-tailed time warp, and you come upon the flip side of the mass tourism coin. For just as the name Bali is writ large in the fantasies of the budget traveler, so it signals exotica to the sophisticated end of the travel market, and in recent years more and more temples of five star luxury have sprung up to cater to those who arrive in the front end of the plane.

I watched The Legian being built over a number of visits to Bali in the mid '90s, and with a growing sense of curiosity. Its spectacular location facing the beach and ocean was one thing, but what intrigued me most was its apparent elegance. It seemed to exude a quiet, understated sense of taste that the big international chains either failed - or perhaps chose not - to capture.

My first stay confirmed those initial impressions. The resort had been conceived as a complex of suites rather than hotel rooms and the public areas were blissfully serene, with the reception desk and other hotel trappings discreet to the point of invisibility. It immediately caught my photographic eye and I set about creating my own interpretation of the world that The Legian had created.

I discovered an empathy between the subject matter and my way of working right away. My style of photography has been called reflective - even meditative - in character. Whether or not these descriptions are accurate, the hotel's tranquillity presented a wealth of images that immediately seemed to gel when framed in the lens. The task was to determine what my objective was and to identify the shots that would help achieve this goal. I wanted to show The Legian by day and by night; I wanted to say beach, architecture, food, spa - all the things the hotel is - without shouting them; and I wanted to create images that were a little tantalizing - glimpses, often in close up, of subjects which in some way defined the total experience.

Any photographer who claims they can walk into a situation and pre-determine exactly which shots will fulfill a brief is probably bluffing. I certainly can't. Although I had fixed my objectives before hand, I allowed myself to roam freely, searching out images within very wide parameters. The skill then comes in the distillation process; in sitting down with the work prints and setting yourself a finite number of visuals within which the 'story' must be told.

When selecting the ten photographs which comprise The Legian portfolio, I began with a core of three architectural shots (plates 1,3 and 10). These formed, if you'll excuse the pun, a concrete foundation, defining the physical building and allowing me to add in the descriptive software. I chose two shots taken on the beach immediately in front of the hotel (plates 8 and 9) to convey location, and two shots of decorative artifacts (plates 4 and 6) to 'bring the beach indoors'. Two of The Legian's enduring images rounded off the portfolio: The tray of oils and spices from the spa greets every guest as they take a seat at the reception desk, while the ubiquitous white flower arrangement seen in plate 10 is echoed in floral table motifs (plate 7) and a single white orchid placed in guest bathrooms (plate 5).

People who see portfolios of my work invariably comment that they like this shot or that. It's a perfectly valid thing to say, of course. Each shot should - and I hope does - stand on its own as a successful entity. And yet to pick and choose is also to miss something. As I write this, I am looking at a print-out of all ten photographs, thumbnail size, on a single sheet of paper, and I can't help but notice how they feed off each other to create a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts. It's why I love working in portfolios; however loosely or rigidly one defines the theme, the extra dimension they provide is always rewarding, always beneficial to the cause.

The Legian may be a series of ten photographs, but for me the portfolio as a whole forms a subliminal eleventh image. It says beach and ocean, flowers and spa, architectural uniqueness and understated elegance all at once, and depicts, more than individual photographs ever could, The Legian as an island within the island of Bali.

The Legian has published a separate portfolio of Jon Morgan's night-time photographs of the hotel, entitled Seven Nights at The Legian.
The Legian Hotel's web site is at www.ghmhotels.com/h-legian

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