Provincetown is known far and wide as “the edge of the world,” and perhaps it’s the remote nature of this Cape Cod beach town that led it to become a refuge for artists, the queer community, and eccentrics of all stripes. Or maybe it’s Provincetown’s odd history as the landing point for the Mayflower and the site where the Mayflower Compact was signed. The almost-surreal natural beauty of the place, with its hyper-beautiful ocean sunsets and endless stretches of beach and ocean waves, would certainly lend itself to people with an interesting perspective on the world, as well as its gorgeous summer weather. More likely, Provincetown’s affordability in the 70s and 80s is what made it attractive to artists and writers, with cheap beach shacks becoming perfect getaways to paint and think for a generation of creative luminaries, from Tennessee Williams to Jackson Pollock.
While it retains its creative lure, that affordability is no longer the case; Provincetown’s natural beauty and quirky reputation have made it a favorite vacation destination of well-heeled East Coasters, and it’s a far cry from the inexpensive artist hamlet it once was. Perhaps that’s partly why Provincetown, a new book of portraits by photographer Joel Meyerowitz, is so captivating. Meyerowitz, as he explains in the book’s introduction, spent his summers throughout the late 1970s and early 80s in Provincetown, where he found that the natural light of the Cape “penetrated and exposed people’s mystery, revealing their true identities in such a way that everyone became beautiful.” So he began taking pictures, of locals and families and passers-through and those who replied to a newspaper ad he filed seeking interesting faces to shoot. The end result are these photos, striking both for their allure and for the age they document: pre-internet, in the earliest throes of the AIDS crisis, a time before globalization and other forces would turn Provincetown into something else, when it still held that otherworldly, quirky, utterly unique charm. Check out selections from Meyerowitz’s new book below, available for pre-order now from Aperture.
