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The Summer Belongs to Joel Meyerowitz
With his newly reissued Cape Light, Meyerowitz helped establish color photography as fine art, imbuing small-town life with luminous beauty.
On the occasion of the fiftieth-anniversary reissue of Cape Light, we’re sharing Joel Meyerowitz’s preface. Through July 21, collect limited-edition prints by the artist in celebration of the new edition.
This book was the result of two summers of joyous and feverish seeing out on the far reaches of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Within that fever, a meditative state of grace appeared that taught me things about photography, and myself, I had not known before.
I made a leap in the dark in 1976—or as it turned out, a leap into the light. Leaving behind the 35 mm camera and the streets of New York for a while, I came to reconsider what photography meant to me, specifically how color photography described the world. For a Bronx-born street photographer, giving up the jazz-inflected rhythms and spontaneity of city life for an 8-by-10-inch view camera and the shadow-free luminosity of the outer Cape was a welcome, and subsequently life-changing, challenge.
For the first time in my life I slowed down, took a deep breath, and watched the slow, incremental movements of light and shadow cross a sandbar in the ebbing tide, or a grassy hill ripple in sea-blown wind. I stared at sunlight raking over clapboard siding, transfixed by the simplicity of it all. It reminded me of Edward Hopper, who said, “What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” How strange it was to find myself softening, and entering into moments of communion with such numinous and evanescent things.
Joel Meyerowitz Print Bundle
$360.00
Collect three prints from Joel Meyerowitz’s celebrated Cape Light series. This collectors’ set includes a copy of the book. Available for only a limited time.
Those experiences, so far from the hard realities and instant-to-instant swirl of urban complexity and chaos, lifted me into a contemplative state where I felt myself merge with whatever it was that called my name. Who can say exactly why, or how, they change? But I felt change come over me as a wave of growing consciousness, in which everything had the potential for new meaning—especially when seen upside down under the dark cloth of the view camera.
The first edition of Cape Light was published in 1978, at a time when color photography was being newly recognized as an overlooked part of the medium’s history. Now, nearly fifty years later, this new edition of Cape Light has an entirely remastered set of prints, from superb scans made possible by the digital advances of our day. The images printed in this volume have come back with a fidelity to the original moment of which no previous edition had been capable. I am filled with gratitude.
All photographs © the artist and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery
