Days of Summer: Raffaele Ferrari and the Beaches of the World
Ever since my early studies in psychology — and now in my career as a photographer — I’ve been fascinated by human behavior, by social relationships and by the way people interact with nature. Mine is an anthropological, social, historiographic gaze: it analyzes, selects, archives. The challenge, then, is to understand, to transcribe, to tell my visible horizon — to speak about what exists. In doing so, I try to build an empathetic, deeply human relationship with the places and the actions I investigate.
These spaces act as a backdrop, a secondary stage set against the interaction between anonymous figures and crowds inside the frame. My work mostly portrays ordinary, everyday situations in which I sense the relationship between the individual and the space. Rather than focusing on the place or the beauty of the image, I try to picture ourselves and our society — catching spontaneous social interaction. The subject I photograph most is the sea, its life and its colors. For me it’s an inexhaustible source of inspiration. So often my work has invited the viewer to enjoy the sea, the warmth, and that feeling of freedom and fullness that comes from living at the water’s edge.
Born on the Mediterranean coast, the sea is part of my personal history. As a child I played on the beach; as a teenager I walked along the shore. If the sea is there in your childhood, it stays inside you and follows you your whole life. That’s why it has always been with me, and so often become the subject of my photographs — maybe it’s even the way it guides me. Either way, it has always fascinated me, and I can spend hours watching it, sometimes from far away. Those are special moments for me, when I look at it alone from the shore.
I wanted this to be a kind of series of images expressing the strong emotions and impressions that stayed with me through my summer days on these different beaches. Watching these chosen seascapes, I felt moods that I translated into images, with my own defined style and an articulated narrative.
The Days of Summer project was born in 2022, out of my desire to build a visual story about the space between the beach and the sea, and how people live it. It’s a place of fun and sociability, but also of sharing. The idea was to investigate that space — across different seasons, too — to see whether my mental image held up against the reality of the place. Beaches change a lot from one area to another, even within the same country: in the South a playful side prevails, while elsewhere in Italy it’s the beach club that dictates the experience. The Mediterranean, being a warm sea, leads people to live the beach mostly for swimming and fun, compared with Northern Europe, where you might go to do sport or simply to walk. Same story in the Basque Country — a paradise for anyone who loves to surf, or who goes to the sea to fish; you rarely find umbrellas and people spending the day sunbathing.
On the Atlantic, tides shape coastal life: in France, for instance, people use low tide to go out and gather oysters. Portugal is a curious case — on the Atlantic coast they’ve built pools right on the sea, while the South has features closer to the other Latin countries, beach clubs and all. And the seasons mark huge differences from one place to the next. In Livorno, on fine spring days, shops sometimes open late in the afternoon because the owner lingered too long at the beach! On our Tuscan coast the start of summer has a real fervor to it; then, by August, the sea becomes the preserve of the vacationers, with locals happy to leave the beach to the tourists.
One final thought goes to global warming, which has stretched the beach season from three months to five — a new pressure on the whole coastal economy.
The photographer
Raffaele Ferrari, born in 1980 in Rosignano Marittimo, took a degree in Psychology at the University of Florence, then moved to Barcelona and worked as a psychologist. During those years he grew his passion for photography, starting out on film before turning to documentary and landscape work. His most recent projects explore coastal life, the oceans and the Mediterranean. His photo series have been shown in solo and group exhibitions across Italy, Europe and the United States. When he’s not traveling, he lives in Tuscany.
Text and photos by Raffaele Ferrari — www.raffaeleferrari.com
