Discover a special Mediterranean jetty with photographer Miro Lovejoy Teplitzky

Somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean there lies a small wooden jetty, a jetty which pulls in a myriad of different people across the summer. Photographer Miro Lovejoy Teplitzky has been visiting such a place for the last five years, documenting the certain youthful culture that passes through the jetty. “At the time, it was much more foreign and exotic to me, as everything is the first time you come across it,” Miro tells It’s Nice That. “Over the years, people, places, sunrises and sunsets, nature and the feeling it all brought up became more familiar and my perception was more of deep love than a fleeting desire.” Eventually, Miro felt drawn back to the jetty with a fresh new perspective: one which saw it as a place where visitors were chasing a sensation of youth. “I flew back in the month of August this year, trying to figure out how to make pictures that could describe this feeling,” he explains. “I am someone who always looks for events that may seem quite small, but have larger, significant meaning, so in this case it was about youth, life and beauty in a microcosm.”

The series is a fascinating insight in to the ways in which people draw subtle connection between place and emotion, often returning to landscapes that trigger fond memory. “Viewers will definitely not have the same response and will make up their own narratives drawn from their own experiences,” Miro says. “But, I hope that they feel something.” Soft, summery hues fill the entire series, which Miro says were purposeful aesthetic decisions. “The intention was always for it to feel very simple and to replicate what it looks like when you’re there in the flesh,” the photographer explains. “I tried to look at it in a timeless way and keep modernity out of the images as much as possible.”

While the colours of the series are warm and full of joy, it’s also the subjects of the images which breath life in to Miro’s Youth project. “One element that I was keen to explore was the multiplicity of nationalities that visited, mixed in with the locals,” Miro says. “It was often hard to distinguish, as people were so comfortable in their surroundings.” Miro conjured up conversation with all his subjects, whether or not they shared a language. “One thing I insisted on was getting their email to send them the pictures, to try and make the whole process less fleeting,” he adds.

Ultimately, however, it was the jetty that was at the centre of this work. “I believe that everyone’s experience of place was made by the jetty,” Miro tells us. “It let people be youthful and without inhibition. It created pure joy and I think that is what I was after in making the pictures.”