Summer is a special time. And it has been the star of photography ever since it became a mass medium. It was so for the great masters and for ordinary people even before the arrival of the ubiquitous smartphone cameras. Whether they were Polaroids, photos taken with disposables or Kodachrome to show off to friends when they returned from holiday, photography has always accompanied our summers. By the sea or in the mountains, at the lake or in the city.

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer”. The words with which Fitzgerald closes his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, are a hymn to new beginnings, and perfectly capture the feeling of a moment. What is summer if not the end of one part of our lives and the beginning of a new one? At the same time, this summer, the first of the decade in which the Covid limits our movements less, will also be remembered for the war in Ukraine, as well as for the great heat and drought. And for being, in all likelihood, the coolest summer in years to come. In the meantime, the dolce farniente rages on social media as #dolcefarniente.

Whether you’re on holiday on a South East Asian island reopening after a long lockdown, on the coast of Italy or along the English Channel like W.G. Sebald did in The Rings of Saturn, in the streets of a big emptying metropolis or in a flat that adapts to temperatures around 40 degrees, or wherever you are, Domus gives you the chance to tell your summer story.

How do you do it? It’s simple: send us a photo, or a series (up to a maximum of five), using this link.

Horizontal, vertical or square photos are fine, as long as they are optimised for the web and weigh no more than 10 megabytes each. Colour or black and white, shot from a smartphone or view camera: anything goes. You can accompany them with a short text (maximum 1000 characters, including spaces). The deadline for submission is 1 October 2022.

The best ones will be published on our digital platforms.

Opening image: On the edge of reality. Photo © Marco Piffari