Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1976, Joel Meyerowitz left the streets of New York for the far end of Cape Cod. He took his family and a wooden Deardorff 8x10, built in 1938, the year he was born. He had bought it in Salt Lake City from a man who was selling off all his equipment.
He thought he would keep working the street in Provincetown. “I hardly made any pictures on the street,” he said years later. “Everything else seemed to call to me.” On a tripod a metre and a half tall, the camera set the pace: “An 8 x 10 camera isn’t for horse races. You do what it tells you to do.”
So he slowed down. He watched the light cross a sandbar in the ebbing tide, the sun rake over clapboard, the street lamps come on at dusk and the lights inside the cottages, in exposures that could last minutes. “I made a leap in the dark in 1976,” he writes in his preface to the new edition, “or as it turned out, a leap into the light.”
“Cape Light” came out in 1978. It was his first book, and it has sold more than 150,000 copies. This year Aperture has published it again.
In 2018, while he was helping me with my own book, one of the things Joel asked of me was patience. Long before, he had said: “The 8 x 10 taught me reverence, patience, and meditation.”
Works: Truro, Massachusetts, 1976 · Roseville Cottages, Truro, Massachusetts, 1976 · Corn Hill, Truro, Cape Cod, 1976 · Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1976 · Storm Over Corn Hill Beach, Truro, Cape Cod, 1976 · Hartwig House, Truro, Massachusetts, 1976 · Cosmos, Provincetown, 1976 · Red Interior, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1977 · Doorway to the Sea, Provincetown, 1982 · Porch, Provincetown, 1977.
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