Portraits from Provincetown: Inside Joel Meyerowitz’s New Book

A new book from Joel Meyerowitz features portraits taken in 1980s Provincetown, many of which have not been published before.

Originally published in 1978, the book remains one of the Bronx-born image-makers’ most enduring publications. Over 40 years later, and Meyerowitz’s new book Provincetown,  hones in on a small town on the northeasternmost tip of Cape Cod, featuring a series of portraits taken in the resort town. The portraits in Provincetown were taken in the early 1980s when he had been experimenting with a large-format camera and portraiture for a few years.

“In 1973, -4, -5, I was going through a big change in my work. I kept on demanding greater visual descriptions because I wanted to make very large-scale prints. Since I was a street photographer, large-format photography wasn’t in my vocabulary. I found a large scale eight-by-ten inch wooden camera and I decided to try it for a summer.”, Meyerowitz says over the phone from Tuscany, where he mostly lives now.

The beach town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, has long been defined by outsiders. A safe haven for the queer community and a getaway for artists, it is a place defined by openness and tolerance. Throughout the late 1970s and early ’80s, Joel Meyerowitz spent his summers there, roaming the seaside with an 8-by-10 camera, making exquisite, sharply observed portraits of families, couples, children, artists, and other denizens of the progressive community. A cast of characters appear and reappear from season to season against a picturesque backdrop of sea, sand, and sun. Provincetown collects one hundred portraits, most never before published, bringing viewers into an idyllic world of self-styled individualism.

About the Author

Joel Meyerowitz (born in New York, 1938) 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, and has published over thirty books, including the Aperture titles Legacy (2009), Cape Light (2015), and Seeing Things (2016). He lives in Italy.