The Beach Boys

THE BEACH BOYS
Atrani, Italy – 2024

The beach at Atrani on the Amalfi Coast may lack the pristine white grandeur of the beaches of Pampelonne in St Tropez, and it comes without illicit tales of Brigitte Bardot and Roger Vadim or the international jet set, but it is no poor cousin, as it boasts of as timeless and historic a backdrop as any beach in the world. It is picture postcard Italy at its celestial best.

Telling a story with a backdrop as visually arresting as this has its challenges; it is easy to fall into the trap of being gratuitous. I was not the first photographer to stand here and I won’t be the last. In the same way that it is creatively timid to simply plonk a cowboy in front of the Grand Canyon, I knew it would be artistically lame to take an individual portrait in front of that famous stretch of the Amalfi Coast.

I found some inspiration from Mario Testino’s work in Copacabana Beach in Rio some 26 years ago and I am never ashamed of being a sponge. As Ansel Adams instructed us, “photography is often about the pictures of others”, but we just need to execute in our own way.

The beach boys I used that day were all Neapolitans and I told them to enjoy themselves with Brooks Nader - a leading Sports Illustrated swimsuit model and a girl with absurd energy levels. This was not their hardest day at the office, but equally, they had to be as natural and as free as the seas to their left.

Photographing a group is never easy; most images don’t stack up as one person can tend to kill an image. But there is a unity of joy in this image and everyone is bang on. It could have been taken 50 years ago and that was very much my intent.
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