Claudia and Dorene, 1981

“[For those of us] who find our way here—travelers, artists, writers, playwrights, actors, poets, straight, gay, lesbian, gender-nonconforming, black, white, foreign, anyone who wants to move from the urban pressures to the spacious and spiritual beauty of the Outer Cape—Provincetown is where your identity and sense of ‘home’ come to the ground.” —Joel Meyerowitz The beach town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, has long been defined by outsiders—a haven for the queer community and a getaway for artists, a place of openness and tolerance. Throughout the 1970s and the early ’80s, Joel Meyerowitz spent his summers there, roaming the seaside with an 8-by-10 camera, making exquisite, sharply observed portraits of denizens of the progressive community—families, couples, children, artists, and others. In Meyerowitz’s photographs, a cast of characters appears and reappears from season to season against the picturesque backdrop of sea, sand, and sun. Provincetown collects these portraits, most never before published, bringing viewers into an idyllic world of self-styled individualism. By a master of the medium, this body of work is a visual time capsule of a storied LGBTQ community. Aperture is pleased to work with the artist and bring three wonderful limited-edition prints to our audience of collectors, all of which appear in the monograph. The proceeds from these prints help to support the publication in addition to supporting the artist and helping to underwrite Aperture’s publishing and public programs.

Pigment Print
Image Size: 10 1/4 x 13 inches
Paper Size: 11 x 14 inches
Edition of 15
Signed and numbered by the artist on verso

Joel Meyerowitz  (b. 1938, the Bronx, New York) 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. Meyerowitz has published over thirty books, including the Aperture titles Legacy (2009), Cape Light (2015), and Seeing Things (2016). He lives in New York and is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery.