There’s a beach on the Tuscan coast that you won’t find in glossy travel guides or among Italy’s most Instagrammed spots. It’s an everyday beach, lived-in, full of local characters and ghostly architecture, where summer unfolds between watermelon slices under beach umbrellas, water games, and old kiosks with a decadent charm. It’s here that Salvatore Matarazzo pointed his flash, giving us Pocket Beach, a powerful and visceral photographic narrative capable of revealing the most authentic soul of our relationship with the sea.
Born in Viareggio in 1980 and a member of the international collective Full Frontal Flash, Matarazzo is no stranger to projects blending intimacy and irony. With his bold and skillful use of flash, he sculpts faces and bodies under the scorching sun of the Italian summer, portraying an image that’s as grotesque as it is affectionate. In Pocket Beach, his lens focuses on Marina di Massa, but it could be any beach in provincial Italy. What matters are the stories: micro-narratives of freedom, spontaneity, and small seaside epiphanies.
There’s the man singing with a tiny radio hidden under his swimsuit, kids chasing each other with water guns along the rocks, the lady who refuses to be photographed but offers a slice of watermelon. Every encounter is a shot, every shot a social portrait. And then there are them: the colonial eco-monsters, former fascist summer camps now crumbling, standing as absurd and necessary backdrops, architectural glitches that freeze time and heighten the surreal.
The tone of the narrative is diaristic and cinematic. Matarazzo doesn’t just observe: he jumps into the water with an inflatable mattress to catch three boys on the rocks by surprise, he sunburns his skin, he gets involved with the micro-community that animates the beach. Pocket Beach is a work that tastes like nostalgia and ongoing discovery. It’s a summer lived skin-deep, where everyone, in their swimsuit, sheds social masks and reveals their true self.
Originally published in 2017, the project remains to this day a visual manifesto of Matarazzo’s approach to photography: visceral, theatrical, always on the edge of intrusiveness but capable of forging genuine connections. In an era where photography is increasingly filtered and constructed, Pocket Beach brings us back to the raw and tender truth of film and flash straight to the face. A project that inevitably reminds us of the same evocative power of Martin Parr and places us in a fully Italian setting.
“When people go to the beach, they don’t worry about being covered by just a swimsuit. They free themselves from inhibitions,” writes Matarazzo. And in those temporary, fleeting but true freedoms, something deeper about being human is reflected.
