Cape Light

A New York City native, Joel Meyerowitz began snapping photographs of everyday street scenes in the early 1960s. Initially, he worked in black-and-white, but as color film became more widely available, he was among the first to adopt it as a serious fine art medium. He eschewed notions that the new technology was less “legitimate” than its monochrome predecessor. Henri Cartier-Bresson, for instance, who was born 30 years earlier than Meyerowitz, is renowned for his candid photos, predominantly shot in black-and-white. Although he was eventually a reluctant adopter of color, he had his opinions. William Eggleston, another early fan of color, recalls Cartier-Bresson telling him that it was “bullshit.” Cartier-Bresson eventually destroyed virtually all of his negatives that weren’t black-and-white.

For Meyerowitz, though, the immediacy of color has long been a way to connect more viscerally to a scene and to contemplate compositional elements with an added layer of complexity. From his 35mm observations of New York City in the late 1960s and 1970s to further experiments with larger format cameras and landscapes, there is an airy vitality to these images that still rings clearly, even with the patina of nostalgia inherent in the way we view analog film work today. They are transportive, subtle, and meticulously constructed.

The artist’s keen attention to mood, happenstance, individuality, and place through a number of series currently centers the exhibition Joel Meyerowitz: Select Works, 1962-2019 at Huxley Parlour. The relaxed yet attentive tone of his Cape Light series captures the atmospheric northern Atlantic coast in glowing yellows, stormy blues, and evening purples. “Evening light playing over still waters forms a recurring motif—the jazz of the street has subsided here, replaced by something more symphonic,” the gallery says. Many of the images were captured around Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the late 1970s, preserving slices of the area’s historic cedar shake cottages, shoreline, drive-ins, and dunes.

Where the snaps of urban hubbub are energetic, up-close, sometimes from the hip, and both intimate and enigmatic, the large-format images are necessarily slowed down, more meditative. Yet they are far from still. Laundry flaps in the wind in the yard of a coastal home. A partly lit picket fence appears to both pierce and support a cloud. And a bolt of lighting strikes in the distance as light spills from a house onto its porch.

Both the place and the images are an escape, not just to a location and the timeless feeling of the seaside retreat but to a particular era that, over time, is steeped further in reminiscence. Meyerowitz’s deep comprehension of color connects us more instinctively to these experiences. And while polychrome imagery may no longer be jarring in the sense that it is disruptive, in these tender photographs, fleetingness and candor are preserved and well-aged. In our era of proliferous imagery overload, we can pop the lid for a dose of curiosity and the marvelous. For Meyerowitz, there is a hint of the sublime in how things we see may be perceived differently at different times or in (literally) different lights, and how the potential for surprise is as much a compositional element as form, contrast, and hue.

A book of images Meyerowitz captured in Massachusetts during the 1970s and 1980s, aptly titled Provincetown, is available on his site. Selected Works, 1962-2019 continues through July 11 in London. ✧

All images © Joel Meyerowitz, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery and Huxley Parlour.