Dutch summer is a photographer’s dream. The light arrives before half past five and doesn’t properly leave until after ten in the evening, and in between the entire city moves outdoors. Doorsteps become terraces, canals become swimming pools, people sunbathe everywhere, from windowsills to parks, and the sidewalks are competing in an unofficial flower show.
I’ve been photographing this same summer for fifteen years now. The bikes change, the haircuts change, but the way the evening light lands on the brick, and the way everyone tilts their face towards the sun at the first opportunity, that never changes. The amount of days when people can truly enjoy summer here has changed as well. Instead of weeks going by with only rain in the calendar, now we melt in the heatwaves.
This page is a wander through that archive: one season, told in photo essays from 2011 to today.
If you’re after plans rather than pictures, my guide to what to do in Amsterdam in summer has the practical side covered. This one is for the mood.
The city becomes a garden
Every summer Amsterdam turns into an informal botanical garden. It starts at street level, with whatever the neighbours have managed to grow in a crack in the pavement, and it doesn’t stop.
In June 2016, the whole city seemed to smell of roses; I chased them from street to street for the time of roses. Peonies are my soft spot, though: they remind me of a peony bush in my family’s garden, and in 2019 I gave them a photo essay of their own. By midsummer the hollyhocks take over: crêpe-paper petals on stems that grow out of nothing against the brick walls. I adore them!
Some of the oldest posts on this blog belong here too: the acacia blossom of my first Amsterdam summer in 2011, back when I thought wisteria was an acacia tree (and I wasn’t very far off as they belong to the same family) and the blooming doors that turn ordinary house entrances into small jungles. And because this is the Netherlands, the flowers get rained on regularly, which only makes them better to photograph: flowers and raindrops.
Not all of it happens at street level. Once a year a handful of owners open the gates to the gardens hidden behind the canal houses, and I spent a sunny day walking through them, a whole green world you would never guess was there. And some of the best flowers are the ones nobody planted: the two fenced ponds in Westerpark that quietly fill with water lilies, or the weekend the Van Gogh Museum covered half of Museumplein with a labyrinth of 125,000 sunflowers; was there for two days, and then gone.
Life on the water
Summer is when the water in this city is the most appreciated. One lazy Sunday in 2016 I didn’t feel like leaving town and spent a day by the water at the Oude Houthaven instead (still one of the quietest corners of the city on a hot day). The canals themselves deliver a steady parade of the unexpected: I once watched a yellow submarine sail past, and another time a boat of little sailors — small, brave and entirely in charge.
When it gets properly hot, the canals and the Amstel river turn into a vast flowing pool and people simply get in, which is exactly what I photographed one July when it was too warm to stay dry. Others never leave the water at all: there are around 2,500 houseboats moored in this city, and I have spent years collecting their details and their decorations.
Once a year the water hosts one of the city’s biggest party. Everyone photographs the Canal Parade boats; in 2016 I turned the camera around and photographed the audience instead. And every five years, we have the SAIL Festival coming to town, and it’s amaaazing! My favourite part of SAIL is not the tall ships, though — it is that anyone with a boat joins in, so the IJ fills up with people and their own boats, which is a much better show.
Summer light, summer weather
Let’s be honest about the Dutch summer: rain is a big part of it (or it used to be?!). Sometimes right after a heatwave, as it did in July 2011, when the city melted for three days and then cooled down with a good rain. A proper Amsterdam summer archive needs its clouds. Mine has a grey July day in 2014 that I still find beautiful, and a gloriously gloomy walk through Amsterdam-West from 2021, because I genuinely love a low sky.
The reward for all that weather is the light when it breaks through. I’m not a morning person, I admitted as much in the morning light, back in 2011, but the few times I’ve caught the city at sunrise have been worth every alarm. One of them was an early morning in 2014, the streets still empty and the canals completely flat; I wrote then that it might become a habit. It did not, at least not until many years later. And then, every year, comes the moment I notice the first yellow leaves in late August and refuse to accept what they mean.
Street life in the long evenings
The long days change how people behave, and that changes what my camera captures. Some of my earliest photo essays were exactly this: people and the city enjoying each other, and the small absurdities I collected in funny Amsterdam, proof that behind the serious gabled facades this city has a sense of humour.
Summer is also when Amsterdammers show off their homes: welcoming entrances dressed up with plants and benches, an open-air museum of doorsteps. Add the bicycles, decorated, full of flowers, occasionally abandoned in (more or less) poetic ways, and you can fill a whole Sunday walk without a destination, which is exactly what I did one 14,000-step Sunday in 2016.
Not every walk is planned. One afternoon I went to Oud-Zuid to pick up a book order and came home hours later, having abandoned everything else I meant to do that day because the neighbourhood was too good to walk past. There is also a whole parallel population keeping an eye on all this: the cats of Amsterdam, in shop windows and on doorsteps, watching the street wake up.
Photographing the Dutch summer: a few notes
If you’re visiting with a camera, the season is generous but has its own rules. The golden hours are long and late; before six in the morning the canals are empty and glassy, and the evening light stays warm until well past nine. Midday is the hardest light of the year; that’s when I photograph details instead: doors, flowers, shadows. One August I took that further and shot the whole season in black and white, which sounds like an odd thing to do to a Dutch summer, but it trains you to look at shape and light instead of colour.
Don’t curse the rain; follow it. The half hour after a summer shower gives you clean air, wet cobblestones and reflections everywhere. My quiet-water spot remains the Oude Houthaven; for everything else, I’ve collected my favourite locations and habits in Amsterdam for photographers.
This archive keeps growing every summer, and autumn, winter and spring will get their own diaries soon. Fifteen years in, the seasons still surprise me.
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