The subject, really, is that high clear Cape sky combed with cirrus and strung with telephone wires, pouring an even summer brightness onto everything below. Under it sits a small white cottage with green shutters and, fixed beneath the gable, a wooden sign that reads COSMOS. The joke writes itself, the cosmos overhead and the cottage that borrows its name, but Meyerowitz plays it straight, letting the weather rather than the wit hold the frame.
Parked at the curb, broadside to us, a brown station wagon with fake-wood flanks and gleaming whitewall wheels takes up the whole middle of the picture, as complacent and rectangular as a sofa. Behind it the sea lies flat and pale to the horizon; a life-ring hangs on a pole at the right, a scrap of cloth beside it. Everything is ordinary and everything is lit to the same fair-weather pitch, so that the car, the cottage and the ocean are granted equal standing. That democratic light is the photograph’s real argument.
Colour photography was still fighting for its seriousness in these years, dismissed as the language of advertising, and Cape Light was among the works that won the case for it. Made with the eight-by-ten view camera, whose slow precision renders the whitewalls, the wire and the far water with equal candour, it placed Meyerowitz beside Shore and Eggleston; his pictures now hang at the Modern, the Met and the Boston MFA. Offered as an archival pigment print, the sheet keeps that clarified daylight and lets the small cottage go on quietly wearing the name of the sky.
The subject, really, is that high clear Cape sky combed with cirrus and strung with telephone wires, pouring an even summer brightness onto everything below. Under it sits a small white cottage with green shutters and, fixed beneath the gable, a wooden sign that reads COSMOS. The joke writes itself, the cosmos overhead and the cottage that borrows its name, but Meyerowitz plays it straight, letting the weather rather than the wit hold the frame.
Parked at the curb, broadside to us, a brown station wagon with fake-wood flanks and gleaming whitewall wheels takes up the whole middle of the picture, as complacent and rectangular as a sofa. Behind it the sea lies flat and pale to the horizon; a life-ring hangs on a pole at the right, a scrap of cloth beside it. Everything is ordinary and everything is lit to the same fair-weather pitch, so that the car, the cottage and the ocean are granted equal standing. That democratic light is the photograph’s real argument.
Colour photography was still fighting for its seriousness in these years, dismissed as the language of advertising, and Cape Light was among the works that won the case for it. Made with the eight-by-ten view camera, whose slow precision renders the whitewalls, the wire and the far water with equal candour, it placed Meyerowitz beside Shore and Eggleston; his pictures now hang at the Modern, the Met and the Boston MFA. Offered as an archival pigment print, the sheet keeps that clarified daylight and lets the small cottage go on quietly wearing the name of the sky.