Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown

“A precious document of a lost world and time.” —Guy Trebay, New York Times “If extraterrestrials asked me to convey the nature of human beings, I’d show them Joel Meyerowitz’s dazzling array of portraits. I can think of no better testament to the joy, the beauty, the sheer force of our lives here on Earth.” —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours The beach town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, has long been defined by outsiders. A safe haven for the queer community and a getaway for artists, it is a place defined by openness and tolerance. Throughout the late 1970s and early ’80s, Joel Meyerowitz spent his summers there, roaming the seaside with an 8-by-10 camera, making exquisite, sharply observed portraits of families, couples, children, artists, and other denizens of the progressive community. A cast of characters appear and reappear from season to season against a picturesque backdrop of sea, sand, and sun. Provincetown collects one hundred portraits, most never before published, bringing viewers into an idyllic world of self-styled individualism.

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 160
Number of images: 100
Publication date: 2019-09-24
Measurements: 10.63 x 12.63 x 0.8 inches
ISBN: 9781597114677

“Contained in the archive was a precious document of a lost world and time. Captured between covers is Mr. Meyerowitz’s record of the Provincetown of my imaginings.” —Guy Trebay, New York Times

“Joel’s latest publication bears the hallmarks of his precise photographic style, but takes us away from the vignettes of life in the city he’s better known for, into Provincetown… The resulting book, released next week, is full of quiet, tender and engaging portraiture.” —Ryan White, i-D

“Meyerowitz’s picture has become a time capsule of a younger, fallow time, with a sense of hope embedded in the beachy light.” —Alina Cohen, Artsy

“The end result are these photos, striking both for their allure and for the age they document: pre-internet, in the earliest throes of the AIDS crisis, a time before globalization and other forces would turn Provincetown into something else, when it still held that otherworldly, quirky, utterly unique charm.” —Them

“If extraterrestrials asked me to convey the nature of human beings, I’d show them Joel Meyerowitz’s dazzling array of portraits. I can think of no better testament to the joy, the beauty, the sheer force of our lives here on Earth.” —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours

“Meyerowitz captures pride and poignancy.” —Bill Shapiro, BLIND

Joel Meyerowitz is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. He is a two-time Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of both National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities awards, and a recipient of the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis, and has published over thirty books. He lives in Italy.