Joel Meyerowitz American, b. 1938

In 1976 Joel Meyerowitz set down the Leica he had carried through New York for fifteen years and climbed up to Cape Cod with an old 8x10 Deardorff view camera. The change was not technical but a matter of breathing: from the fast reflex of the sidewalk to the long time of the exposure, to a way of looking that asks for patience. Out of those first summers came Cape Light (1978), one of the books that, alongside Eggleston and Shore, won colour its place as a serious artistic language.

This photograph belongs to what came after. Returning year upon year to the same view of the bay from his Provincetown house, Meyerowitz found one motif claiming him entirely — the bare meeting of sea and sky — and gathered it into Bay/Sky (1993), the culmination of sixteen years facing the same horizon. Here the composition could hardly be simpler: a low band of water, a vast weight of sky, a horizon so quiet it verges on abstraction. Everything is entrusted to light. As a late-afternoon storm lifts, a seam of pale gold opens along the water's edge and settles on the still surface, while the whole field cools to blues and violets that seem to breathe.

Nothing happens here, and yet the picture is full of event: the turning of the weather, the passage of the hours, the slow theatre of light he taught us to see. There is a deep American Romanticism in it — the luminist hush of Fitz Henry Lane, the coloured silences of Rothko — held within the cool precision of the frame. For Meyerowitz colour was never the cold accounting of things, but sensation: more wavelengths, more radiance, more feeling. Stand before it long enough and an ordinary horizon becomes a place of wonder.

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