Influenced by a story recalling teen love and beach holidays, Miro Lovejoy Teplitzky’s photo series, Youth, is a nostalgic portrait of holiday romance
Photographer Miro Lovejoy Teplitzky was sat at a cafe on a Greek island, looking out over the Ionion Sea, when he recalled an article he’d recently read about a holiday romance. The writer had shared their story of falling in love for the first time while on a family beach holiday as a teenager. Despite having no common language, the intensity of their relationship – and the place they met and lived out their fevered but brief love – had formed a core adolescent memory in the writer’s mind. As Teplitzky reflected on the nostalgic, yearning undercurrent of the article while watching people play, dive, and recline on the small jetty protruding from the rocky coastline into the sea, a feeling coalesced within him. He felt the significance of this special location, drawing people to return year after year; a place where so many seminal experiences would occur and so many romances would kindle; a scenery that would be enshrined in so many memories. Looking out over the jetty, he recalls thinking, “I knew I had to start making pictures.”
The Australian-born, London-based photographer had been to this spot many times (he’s gatekeeping the exact location but will reveal it’s in the north-east of Corfu), and had taken many pictures there, albeit in “a much more frantic, less structured and somewhat incidental way”. But after having read the article that inspired him to think more deeply about the significance of beach holidays and first love, he began making much more considered images. “I had just bought a much larger camera that required me to slow down when photographing and engage much more with anyone or anything I photographed,” he tells Dazed. “I always came back to this notion of making naive pictures. What I mean by that is, capturing the feeling that the person in front of me had, and my reaction to that and not overcomplicating the idea. It was also helped by the fact, the jetty is so small, and I made the decision to only photograph from the confines of it.”
As well as illustrating the allure of “the mythical waters of the Mediterranean”, the series of photographs he created are, in essence, about youth. Despite the range of people which feature in the project, it’s about the potent feeling of immediacy as well as the nostalgia and onging that being in a beautiful summer holiday scene evokes. Teplitzky affirms, “It’s all about youth, about young people being themselves in the heat of the summer months and of older people finding their youth. It’s about falling in love or finding love again.”
The guiding principle of the project was beauty. “On a less abstract level, beauty is always something I look to for guidance. Beauty of the place and the people, of the experience and of all the emotional worlds everyone inhabits there,” he says. But it was also impotant for him that the images convey an impression of the other sensations of being in that scene, not just the visual spectacle. He explains, “If someone said to me, ‘I can really hear these pictures’ then I would feel as though I had captured the place.”
One of the photographer’s main reference points when composing these pictures was cinema. Drawing on the work of filmmakers such as Godard, Fellini and Paolo Sorrentino, many of Teplitzky’s images have that feeling of being from another era. Perhaps because they’re so saturated with nostalgia and yearning, it’s hard to anchor them in time. And, like stills from a film, they suggest narratives. While there’s a great deal of stillness and tranquility throughout the series, there’s also the undercurrent of a story unfurling; some portent meaning in the waves striking the rocks or the long shadows and the apricot skies as the sun lowers. In their sun-drenched perfection they also recall the mood of Call Me By Your Name and the devastation excitement of that on-screen sexual awakening during the heat of a Mediterranean summer.
Whether you’re lucky enough to be travelling anywhere this summer and want to heighten the anticipation, or whether you just want to indulge in a moment of recollection or fantasy, take a look through the gallery above.
