Call him the bard of the beach: Renowned Italian photographer Massimo Vitali made his name with his stunning, iconic images of Europe's surf and sand. In his first beach series shot in America, he turns his gaze to New York's shores, where the tide of humanity meets the wilds of the ocean. Luc Sante explains the communion between artist and subject, and why the Empire State's seafronts are like no others

You can't call Massimo Vitali a beach photographer exactly, although he has photographed many, many beaches, mostly in Europe. You might say, rather, that he's a connoisseur of crowds, specifically the sort of crowds that populate mass-leisure sites (he has also shot discos, ski slopes, and pools). Beaches are so frequent in his work presumably because the sand provides a natural canvas, swimsuits and umbrellas supply interesting pinpoints of color, and, of course, ocean light is something you can't get anywhere else—there's a reason why beach painting and vacations started more or less simultaneously in the nineteenth century. But let's not be pedantic: Massimo Vitali is a great photographer of beaches.

Beach photography has a relatively brief but rich history, ranging from Jacques-Henri Lartigue's dreamlike tableaux of elegant French haut-bourgeois families in their summer whites, circa 1910, to Richard Misrach's rapturous studies of ocean swimmers, from the last few years. Vitali's particular affinities would seem to lie with the Coney Island chroniclers of the postwar era—Weegee and Andreas Feininger, for example—who took pleasure in documenting that tabloid standby: the astounding number of humans who once descended upon New York City's democratic sands every July 4.

But this point of comparison may be slightly deceptive. Vitali's neutral gaze, his quasi-scientific detachment, his precise rules—he makes a point of shooting from an elevation, on the periphery of his subject—all call to mind the great German documenters of the end of industry, Bernd and Hilla Becher. Vitali approaches mass leisure the way the Bechers approach water towers and pitheads: with a kind of entomological collector's passion that may appear cold because it is so rigorous. But the passion is key. Vitali has been photographing beaches for years, though it is clear from these pictures' vigor that he is far from tiring of his subject.

Now, for the first time, he has come to the United States to photograph a series of the great proletarian beaches of New York. Changing demographic patterns mean that Coney Island no longer attracts the throbbing carpet of humanity it once regularly drew. Perhaps for that reason, Vitali takes as his subject not the beach itself but the Mermaid Parade, a relatively recent boardwalk tradition that emphasizes community spirit, Mardi Gras abandon, and a connection to the spirits of the area's carnivalesque past. With Coney Island slated for a Las Vegas–inspired makeover, Vitali's photo will soon look as mistily evocative as old postcards of Luna Park and Dreamland (two of the Coney amusement parks destroyed by fire decades ago).

By contrast, Jones Beach, in Wantagh, looks about par for the summer course—not as jammed as Coney Island but reasonably dense, especially considering its six-and-a-half-mile length. Jones Beach was opened in 1929 by Robert Moses, the Baron Haussmann of New York, with the specific intent of not making it a proletarian beach; the overpasses on the parkways leading there were initially built too low for buses to drive under them. He also forbade all forms of "honky-tonk," from ambulant vendors to hot dog stands and arcades. Vitali's photograph captures the sweep of the place, and in the background you can see the amenities Moses orchestrated, which to his credit are august but not starchy, impressively civic in the way certain train stations once were.