The image of multitudes gathered on beaches, cavorting on the sandy lip where terrestrial life gives way to a world of wet, has preoccupied artists for centuries. Many national art canons, including our own, are stocked with these summer pictures portraying large groups of people congregated on beachfronts, typically at leisure.Given the national debate provoked by Penny Sparrow's racist online post, educators might want to consider a mandatory course in art history. Images, after all, speak more directly to human experience than the admonitions of well-meaning moralists.But where to start? Nineteenth-century France is a safe bet.It was at Gallic beach resorts like Trouville and Deauville that painters like Eugène Boudin, Claude Monet and Édouard Manet produced mercurial, light-filled scenes that not only described Europe's new leisure habits but also reconfigured the possibilities of painting.But it was photographers - not painters - who most faithfully described the world's enduring affection for lazing by the beach. This is true, too, of South Africa, even during the bad old days.On a visit to Durban in 1963, Peter Magubane encountered a group of neatly dressed men relaxing at the beachfront beneath a rectangular city notice. It read, "Bantu Bathing Area".Curious to "see what a real Bantu looked like", Magubane headed for the shoreline. There he stealthily snapped a plump black woman in a white swimming cap from behind, as well as a carefree reveller emerging from the Indian Ocean.Magubane's beach photos describe a kind of bliss from a time of oblivion.Magubane aside, Trevor Appleson, Jodi Bieber, Adil Bradlow, Guy Tillim and Paul Weinberg have all produced memorable beach photos. Two lesser-known names, though, stand out.In the late 1990s, while researching African studio portrait traditions, surf photographer Lance Slabbert spent time photographing black revellers on Durban's beaches."I was living in Durban at the time and I guess a lot of my personal work was a response to the place and its people, an attempt to expand my narrow perspective of life," said Slabbert, who now lives in Bali.His archive keys into a larger body of post-independence African photography recording the leisure habits of free people on beaches.More recently, on New Year's Day in 2012, Cape Town photographer Melanie Cleary spent a full day at Durban's North Beach photographing young revellers enjoying their inheritance."I was probably the only white person on the beach," remarked Cleary.Her portraits recall US impressionist painter Edward Potthast's vivid early-20th-century scenes of vacationers by the sea, while her crowded aerial views recall the Coney Island of 1940 photographed by New York paparazzo Weegee.Family affinities aside, her photos record the deliciously wet ceremony by which freedom is enacted...