When we think of summer photography, we almost always imagine the same scene: a perfect sunset, crystal-clear water, an empty beach. It’s the postcard image of vacation, the one that ends up on postcards and, today, on social media. But summer, real summer, is far more complex.

For many photographers it isn’t a season to idealize, but rather a moment when people change pace, let their guard down and turn public space into a place of encounter. The beach, in particular, becomes one of the few environments where bodies, ages, social classes and habits coexist without apparent hierarchy. This is where photography stops chasing landscape and starts observing people.

This is the idea behind On The Beach, the project Robbie McIntosh has been carrying forward since 2012 on the public beaches of Naples. Rather than photographing the sea, McIntosh watches what happens around it: bodies, relationships, rituals and moments of everyday life. The beach becomes a place where social differences, age and personality coexist in the same space, turning into an authentic portrait of the city. As the author himself has explained, the themes of community, belonging and the body are universal, and that’s what allows the project to speak well beyond Naples.

Among the most emblematic images is Tutto passa (“everything passes”), a portrait of Antonio, an elderly beachgoer recognizable by the now-faded tattoo on his chest. Those two words, “everything passes,” have become far more than a visual detail: they speak to a deeply Neapolitan philosophy of life, made of resilience, irony and the ability to move through time without ever stopping living in the present.

But it would be a mistake to think this is only about Naples. Every summer, everywhere, something similar happens. Beaches, seafronts, campsites, squares and parks become places where people share their free time, build rituals and reveal a more spontaneous version of themselves. It’s precisely this ordinariness that interests many contemporary photographers: not the exceptionality of vacation, but the hidden beauty of ordinary gestures.

Maybe that’s why the most memorable summer photographs aren’t the ones that make us long for a place, but the ones that make us recognize something of ourselves. They don’t simply show us where we’ve been. They remind us who we are when, at least for a few days, we stop working and go back to living our spaces alongside other people.

This article was produced in collaboration with Luigi Falanga and Gaia Forlin aka @super8otto.