Paddy Summerfield’s The Holiday Pictures, published by Dewi Lewis in 2019, turns to the British seaside rather than the glamorous resorts of Deauville or Biarritz. Across 73 duotone plates in a clothbound hardback of 132 pages, Summerfield photographs holidaymakers of all ages — children and parents, babies and teenagers, couples and crowds, and those standing alone. Sunlight gives way to rainy pavements and overcast skies. His subjects doze, daydream, play, watch the sea, cross the sand, and wander promenades and piers, themselves taking photographs to hold the holiday.

The sequencing sets the book apart. Summerfield arranges the pictures so that one frame implies the next: a figure seems to have walked into the following image, a wave curling in one photograph appears breaking in another, where children splash. These adjacencies turn a gathering of individuals into something closer to a collective narrative. The publisher describes it as a primal and universal story of generations at the sea’s edge, looking inward at private feeling and outward to horizon and sky. The effect is less documentary inventory than a rhythm of recurrence and change.

Summerfield, based in Oxford, trained at Guildford School of Art in both photography and film, and his work is held by the Arts Council and the V&A, among private collections. The Holiday Pictures is his fourth book with Dewi Lewis; Mother and Father (2014) was widely acclaimed and appeared on several best-photobook-of-the-year lists, and two of his earlier titles are now out of print. That continuity matters: this is not a debut but a further movement in a sustained body of work.

For collectors, the book’s claims rest on what can be seen and documented. It is a clothbound hardback of generous page count, with a substantial plate section, from a publisher known for serious photographic books. The seaside subject is common; Summerfield’s treatment — a specific British coast, a wide age range, a sequence-driven structure — is the reason to look closely.