Joel Meyerowitz American, b. 1938

The orange sheet is the event. The wind has caught it broadside and pulled it taut into a sail, and the camera, with its 8x10 patience, has held that gust still long enough to let us read every fold the air put into the cloth. Beside it the pink piece has gone soft and translucent where the sun comes through, and farther down the line the blue-and-white stripes twist on themselves until the pattern nearly breaks apart. A clothesline is about the least promising subject a photographer could choose, which is exactly why it works here: there is nothing to recognize, only something to look at.

What holds the picture together is the white wooden rail, ruled straight across the lower third like a staff with the laundry hung from it for notes. Above the rail, two-thirds of the frame is given over to sky, a high Cape Cod sky streaked with cirrus, and the gray shingled gable of the house steps in from the right to keep the whole thing from floating off. The camera describes the shingles, the small dark window, the dirt below the line with the same even attention it gives the cloth. That is the view camera's particular bargain: everything is in focus, so the photographer's choices are all about where to stand and when to release.

This is Provincetown, 1976, from Cape Light, the series in which Meyerowitz traded the quick street frame for the contemplative ground glass and helped argue color into the museums. The achievement is not the subject but the description of it. He found a place where wind, sun, fabric and architecture briefly agreed, and he kept it.