In 1976 Meyerowitz had not long traded the quick black-and-white of the street for a large-format camera and colour film, and Provincetown was where he went to learn what that swap actually cost and gave. It slowed everything down — you don't whip an 8x10 to your eye — and the slowness is in this picture, in the patience of a girl who has ridden a horse to a snack bar and pulled up to the window the way the rest of us pull up a car. Green shirt, hair down her back, a sunburnt heel hanging bare against the chestnut flank: no stirrup, no shoe, just a foot left to dangle while she leans in to order. And there are the cars too, the cream Plymouth Fury beached at the kerb, its chrome catching the Cape Cod sun like it has all the time in the world. Which, that afternoon, it apparently did.
What gets me is how completely nobody is surprised. The horse waits. The plastic soft-serve cone twists up on its sign above SANDWICHES, FISH-CHIPS, FOOD BASKETS, advertising an ice cream the horse will never be offered. A red-lidded bin, a striped awning, the whole banal furniture of a parking lot just carrying on, as if a girl on horseback at the takeaway window were the most ordinary errand in the world. Maybe it was.
You feel the conversion all through it — that itch to record everything at once, the sky's particular blue, the horse's particular brown, the way light describes a fender. He could have made this a joke, the horse-at-the-drive-thru gag. He doesn't. He lets it stay strange and true, the displacement and the belonging held in one frame. You look, and you half-believe you could ride somewhere barefoot too, and be served.
In 1976 Meyerowitz had not long traded the quick black-and-white of the street for a large-format camera and colour film, and Provincetown was where he went to learn what that swap actually cost and gave. It slowed everything down — you don't whip an 8x10 to your eye — and the slowness is in this picture, in the patience of a girl who has ridden a horse to a snack bar and pulled up to the window the way the rest of us pull up a car. Green shirt, hair down her back, a sunburnt heel hanging bare against the chestnut flank: no stirrup, no shoe, just a foot left to dangle while she leans in to order. And there are the cars too, the cream Plymouth Fury beached at the kerb, its chrome catching the Cape Cod sun like it has all the time in the world. Which, that afternoon, it apparently did.
What gets me is how completely nobody is surprised. The horse waits. The plastic soft-serve cone twists up on its sign above SANDWICHES, FISH-CHIPS, FOOD BASKETS, advertising an ice cream the horse will never be offered. A red-lidded bin, a striped awning, the whole banal furniture of a parking lot just carrying on, as if a girl on horseback at the takeaway window were the most ordinary errand in the world. Maybe it was.
You feel the conversion all through it — that itch to record everything at once, the sky's particular blue, the horse's particular brown, the way light describes a fender. He could have made this a joke, the horse-at-the-drive-thru gag. He doesn't. He lets it stay strange and true, the displacement and the belonging held in one frame. You look, and you half-believe you could ride somewhere barefoot too, and be served.