Sorry to the other three seasons, but summer is without a doubt the best time of year. Over the course of a few months, humanity turns feline: long days lounging in the garden or a sunny patch on the bedsheets. Warm evenings fading into nights at the beach. On the sticky, sultry city streets, everyone automatically looks hotter, in every sense of the word, as attested by the likes of Helias Doulis, Oriol Maspons, and Jeremy Jude Lee – photographers with a keen eye for the season’s sensual appeal.

Over the years, Dazed has showcased a number of photo projects that hone in on the sun-drenched months as experienced around the world. (We’re based in London, after all. We have to enjoy summer while we can or, more often, live it vicariously as grey skies loom outside our windows). From Martin Parr’s classic dispatches from the Great British seaside, to seductive scenes in St Tropez or intimate portraits of Neapolitan locals, we’ve gathered some of the greatest summery stories below.

Oriol Maspons’ photos of Ibiza capture the island’s halcyon days, spanning a period from the mid-50s to the end of the 80s when hedonism reigned supreme. Eroticised snapshots of the clubbing Mecca sit alongside images of nudists, hippies, and celebs seeking refuge in the sun. “It seems people enjoyed without fear of being prejudged, in a liberal environment, with freedom and without offending,” Maspons’ son Alex told Dazed earlier this year, as the photos of bohemian non-conformity were bundled into a book by IDEA. “People are enjoying life with absolute naturalness. No one seems to be worried about being singled out, and no one seems to be offended by breaking a social norm.”

If only for practical reasons, nudes are synonymous with the summer months. In Parabyss: A Nurtured Nature, Helias Doulis shows a group of nudists taking full advantage of the clement weather at Limanakia, a beach located approximately 30 minutes from Athens, transformed into a refuge for Greece’s gay community. Taking cues from Greek poets and Pedro Almodovar, the photographer aimed to uncover an often-hidden part of the gay collective subconscious via the series, telling Dazed in 2016: “My thirsty purpose is to highlight the hidden sensitivity of the human body, and especially of the male one, whose tears are generated by the patriarchy.”

“The skies were a rich blue, like a gradient that falls all the way to the ground.” That’s how Jeremy Jude Lee recalled the unseasonably-warm Vancouver summer of 2022, in an interview with Dazed last year. As you can see in his photos from the period, this provided the perfect backdrop for an ongoing exploration of “Asian-Canadian belonging through the lens of nostalgia”, with modern-day scenes seeming lifted from a bygone era, where time stood still and the sun always seemed to be shining.

In the summer of 2023, London-based photographer Tom Ivin headed to New York, to capture the city’s early summer via some of its most charismatic inhabitants. The self-styled subjects of the resulting portraits – published in the second issue of his zine, Astro – are unabashedly themselves, offering a showcase of the city’s unique energy as it comes alive in the heat.

“When you’re with friends or a lover and really enjoying yourself, you lose track of time,” explained Chad Moore in 2017, on the title of his show at Galerie du Jour Agnès b. “When you lose track, it’s also really easy for the time to pass too quickly – that day or night is over… how’d it get too late, so soon?” In an age of constant connection via phones and computers, though, this feeling can be easy to forget. Featuring starry summer nights and nude swimming, the photographer’s dreamy photo series can be interpreted as a guide to keeping that in mind.

For the 2022 photo series I Just Wanna Surf, Gabriella Angotti-Jones took inspiration from the Y2K surfing and skateboarding magazines that she idolised as a teenager, but places overlooked parts of the culture – namely, POC and non-binary surfers – front and centre. Images of friendship, sisterhood, and joy are set against the shimmering Pacific ocean. What could capture the spirit of summer better than that?

Continuing the theme of Californian counterculture, LA skateboarder Tino Razo examines the phenomenon of seeking out and skating the state’s abandoned – or semi-abandoned – swimming pools in Party in the Back (2017). On a darker note, it’s also a tribute ot the life and death of his late ex-wife. The sunny skating sessions it showcases, he told Dazed at the time of publication, “were the start of my mind being temporarily free from thoughts of heartbreak and regret, and that’s really the underlying deal of all of this… The whole project is dedicated to Desiree. It was a healing process at such a weird, crazy time – pool skating gave me my sanity back.”

The British seaside is a recurring theme in Martin Parr’s body of work, and it makes sense. Spending summer holidays parked resolutely on the beach – whatever the weather – is one of the nation’s most ingrained traditions, and for many Brits it opens up the rare possibility for moments of vulnerability. Needless to say, these are some of Parr’s favourite moments: sunburned kids holding a cone of chips, pastel skies above faded promenades, ice cream vans warbling through the streets. The photos might not be glamorous, but for many of us they sum up the nostalgic realities of summer better than any bronzed, seafoam-sprayed nude ever will.

Luca Anzalone’s Naples, captured across the summer of 2017, is one of sun-kissed domesticity. “Naples and people from Naples have this unique energy… you almost get addicted to it,” he told Dazed a couple of years later. “You feel life at 360 degrees. The Neapolitan approach to life is joyfully intense. You breathe in the energy that spreads across each road, small harbour, seafront and window sill.” With his lens turned on everyone from fishermen, to souvenir vendors, to scorched tourists on the beach, the photographs document an enviable slice of Neapolitan life, as experienced by the region’s local people.

The photos in Philippe Garner’s aptly-named Summer – Seventies – Saint-Tropez were captured when he was a young man in his twenties, and he spent every summer on the French Riviera. This was the mid-60s and 70s, and as he told Dazed several decades later: “We had a different attitude to time, and a very different attitude to life.” The place itself was also different. It was a “golden moment” when it retained a chic, bohemian village feel, before it gained a reputation as a flashy destination for the summering elite. The photos themselves are drenched in all the sun and vivid colours you’d expect, with a dash of uninhibited sexuality thrown in for good measure.