Summer in Photographs

I love summer because it feels like the only time things actually happen. The heat, the light, days that stretch out. You remember summers. A smell, how someone looked in a moment, the burn on your shoulders. They stay.

Alex Freund’s Shades of Summer is just photographs of people in that light—Bekah Jenkins and Vanessa Milde mostly, lying around in direct sun, squinting as the heat pulls color from their skin and hair. Nothing fancy. Just the documentary weight of being outside when it’s hot, when you’re young or stupid or brave enough to lie still in the middle of the day.

There’s something honest about it. Summer photography is easy to ruin. You get oversaturated vacation clichés, everything golden and sepia and dripping with nostalgia before it even happens. But Freund stays still. He watches what’s actually there—the specific white of direct sun, the blue of skin in shadow, the exhaustion of just being in heat. The photographs don’t try to sell you summer. They show you what it looks like when you’re inside it.

I’m already thinking about August grass, about that particular kind of tired that only heat makes. About whether anyone will photograph us in a way that means something, or if we’ll just sweat and complain and pretend. Either way, it’s coming.