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MOTHERS’ DAYS

The ‘Mama Gaze’ Reveals a Raw and Beautiful Reality

Photographs from the Eye Mama Project by mothers who are artists

By Agata Storer May 14, 2025

To be a new mother is to disappear in plain sight. It’s cold coffee every morning and shirts damp with milk. It’s rocking a stroller with one foot, answering emails with one hand, and losing yourself somewhere between nap schedules. It’s never enough sleep. Never a hot meal. Never a long shower. It’s tantrums on the floor of a shop. Unsolicited advice from strangers. It’s the guilt of formula feeding, the pain of breastfeeding, tiny teeth on your skin, and judgment no matter what you choose. It’s carrying a giant bag filled with the one toy that works, the exact pillow, the only pacifier that soothes. It’s a brain starved of adult conversation, a heart full of love, and a body that no longer feels like your own.

A copy of Eye Mama: Poetic Truths of Home and Motherhood (teNeues, 2023) can be found at the Truro Public Library.

It’s also scrolling through photos on your phone after a 2 a.m. feeding just to feel seen, to stay sane, which is how the Eye Mama Project got underway. It’s a global collective that shows the work of photographer-mothers (and other caregivers) who are looking introspectively into home, family, and self.

Divided Body by Shindy Lestari, Indonesia, 2022.

The project’s founder is the Israeli-born British filmmaker and photographer Karni Arieli, who found herself taking pictures of her own children during the pandemic and noticed many other women photographers posting honest, compelling images of motherhood on social media platforms. She invited 10 photographers to participate, and from there a collection of photographs evolved into a global movement.

It was 2021 when I started following the project. I had just moved to the U.S. to my husband’s hometown, where I knew hardly anyone. Parents picked up their kids from preschool in cars, their faces hidden under masks. I felt completely isolated.

In Pink Sky, 2021, by the writer, her daughter, Malina, stands in front of car lights at sunset in Wellfleet.

Still, we were lucky enough to explore the nature around us every day. I turned to my camera. Documenting my children was a way to stay grounded. Photography helped me find space in the overwhelming closeness of lockdown. It was also a way to begin understanding my home in Wellfleet. The light here often felt magical.

Although I usually use a Hasselblad middle format camera, the image I submitted to Eye Mama, Pink Sky, was captured on my iPhone. It froze a fleeting moment of beauty, one of those surreal Cape Cod skies that appear in summer, with my daughter, Malina, in the foreground.

Luan Breastfeeding by Amy Woodward, Australia, 2021.

I was honored to be among mother photographers whose work was selected for the project, and only later did I discover that many contributors were well known in the photography world. Not all, though. Not long after teNeues published Eye Mama: Poetic Truths of Home and Motherhood, a selection of more than 200 images from the collection, Arieli told the Royal Photographic Society, “We’re not going to do what all the male gaze platforms have done historically, or even just the very high art curation platforms where, if you haven’t had two books and two exhibitions, you don’t exist.”

Long Days, Short Weeks by Luca Marko, Hungary, 2022.

Taking our photographs, we were all the same: mothers navigating endless days with our children, without support, without rest, and often without connection to other adults. We were all trying to stretch what little patience we had, digging deep into our hearts for more love, more grace.

Hidden Mother by Megan Jacobs, United States, 2017.

Emily Schiffer, a photographer who lives in Provincetown and has also worked for the Independent, recalls the exact moment in May 2020 when she shot the photo of her daughter, Lola, that’s now part of the Eye Mama Project. “When I was little, my grandmother would lay me across her kitchen counter to wash my hair,” she says. “It was special. Today we need something special. I clear off the counter, and it works. Lola says sink washes turn her hair into a waterfall.”

May 5, 2020 by Emily Schiffer. Schiffer and her family were living in Brooklyn when she took this photo of her daughter, Lola. Now they live in Provincetown.

Schiffer was living in Brooklyn with her husband and two children when she found Eye Mama. In that pandemic time, when New York was strangely quiet but for sirens, she says, “It was fascinating seeing other people’s realities in photos.” Just as it had for me, photography was what grounded Schiffer. “It tethered me to something bigger than myself,” she says.

Gummy Smiles by Blaire Hawes, United States, 2019.

The project and its purpose to “share the Mama gaze,” as its website says, is still an unfunded effort, though its curator is looking for support to continue. It is growing: it has published more than 4,000 images from among 70,000 submitted under the hashtag #eyemamaproject. With permission from the project, I’ve included, along with my submission and Schiffer’s, a few of my favorite examples here.

MOTHERS’ DAYS

The ‘Mama Gaze’ Reveals a Raw and Beautiful Reality

Photographs from the Eye Mama Project by mothers who are artists

By Agata Storer May 7, 2025

SAND AND ASPHALT

Arthur Nichols’s Panoramic Vision

Looking closely at nature, a photographer finds abstract minimalism

By Pat Kearns Jul 17, 2024

Eastham photographer Arthur Nichols was standing on a causeway at the edge of Onota Lake in Pittsfield during a wet snowstorm in late March 1972. He was looking at trees. There were no leaves on them yet.

Arthur Nichols on the back shore. (Photo courtesy Arthur Nichols)

“Everything was black and white,” he says. “It was like looking at a pencil drawing of the world. I thought it was so magical.” He started taking pictures. “That was the moment this started for me.”

Nichols will show his dunescapes and his photographs of asphalt and seaweed at Gary Marotta Fine Art in a show opening on Friday, July 19 and running through Aug. 29.

The seaweed photographs were taken on Cape Cod Bay between First Encounter Beach and Sunken Meadow Beach in Eastham and on Great Island in Wellfleet. They draw the viewer into both the movement of the sea and Nichols’s process of combining multiple exposures. The result, in fine detail, has the quality of surrealist paintings or abstractions in swirling sweeps of chartreuse, gold, and brown.

In Nichols’s Untitled Dunescape 3, an archival pigment print on cotton rag paper, we see the face of the eroding dune at Ballston Beach in Truro. The photograph brings us close enough to hear the coastal storms crash against the beach and see root systems holding the sand. It seems to compress the long project of erosion into one moment in which a shelf breaks away and slips, revealing a new layer of sand. The shelf runs across the middle of the work like an abandoned railroad track. Nichols has kept the hazy platinum-gray sky mostly out of the picture. His photograph makes the dune feel raw and monumental, brooding after a storm.

*Untitled Dunescape 3* of the eroding face of the dunes at Ballston Beach in Truro.

The dunescapes are composed of multiple photographs taken from a single vantage point. Nichols does this by taking overlapping panoramic images. He uses a tripod that’s level in both directions and pans the setting, identifying the edges of the image he’d like to capture. He goes out past the left end point, takes an exposure, and swings the camera a few degrees so it overlaps 50 percent of the first image. He keeps doing that until he gets past where he wants to end on the right-hand side. By then he has 10 or 12 images that he merges.

The same is true for his minimalist asphalt series, but for these Nichols did not use a tripod. He used a handheld camera because he needed to be able to run out of the roadway if a car came speeding by. To Nichols’s eye, asphalt — in this case seen at a reservoir near Downsville, N.Y. — can become landscape or skyscape.

“I just liked the lines snaking over the blacktop itself,” says Nichols. We can feel the alternately slippery and grating textures of the street. Tire tracks in overlapping black ribbons from Nichols’s merged exposures are reminiscent of gestural elements in an abstract expressionist painting.

More familiar are the elements of Nichols’s photographs of Provincetown’s parabolic dunes and blowouts. In Untitled Dunescape 2, taken in the Province Lands, the hollow of the blowout is alive with pitch pines, dune willows, and beach grasses that spread out from its center.

*Untitled Dunescape 2*, taken in the Province Lands.

“I spent many years in a wet darkroom doing black-and-white work,” Nichols says. He made mostly silver gelatin prints until 2010. He bought his first digital camera that year and has been working in digital ever since. Since making that change, he works in color, which he says he has grown to like, although his images seem to want to avoid it, capturing the absence of it instead.

In his dunescapes, the viewer is often placed on trails with sandy paths ahead. One feels the impulse to scramble forward, up and over the dunes. There are gray and barely blue skies, dull gold grasses and reeds along bald strips of sand, the dark of marshes and ponds that flank the frames, and trails that disappear into the distance.

Nichols has a B.F.A. in photography from the University of Bridgeport. He ended up working in engineering, but he says photography has always been his passion. “It is also a second job that costs me money,” he says.

Nichols sees much of what he wants to photograph as he goes about the paths of Eastham, riding his bike to Duck Pond in Wellfleet to swim, or to Orleans on everyday errands, or from the Atlantic to the bay, where he goes to look at seaweed. Walking on the bayside beaches, his pace slows — “My wife says I walk at the pace of a tripod.”

*Seaweed 2*, photograph by Arthur Nichols. (All art images courtesy Gary Marotta Fine Art)

Nichols had a dream when he first got into photography. In it, Alfred Stieglitz appeared and told him, “Photograph what you like.” Nichols says there are a lot of things one might want to take pictures of, but he wonders if the way we snap so many pictures on our phones means we’re missing something.

A student of meditation and yoga for 50 years — he met gallerist Gary Marotta at a meditation retreat in Boston — Nichols prefers a more contemplative approach. “I’m old school, and I like paper,” he says. “It’s something that sticks around longer than 30 seconds.”

Minimalist Lens

The event: Photography by Arthur Nichols
The time: Friday, July 19 through Thursday, Aug. 29
The place: Gary Marotta Fine Art, 162 Commercial St., Provincetown
The cost: Free

PHOTOGRAPHY

Portraits of the Artists

Ron Amato’s photographs of Provincetown artists capture a creative community

By John D'Addario Jul 2, 2024

Nearly everyone who lives in or visits Provincetown knows about its vibrant artistic community. Far fewer know the names and faces of the artists who compose it.

Ron Amato’s project is an important historical document. “I’m hoping it becomes something people can look at to know this place and this community,” he says. (Photo by Trupal Pandya)

“I didn’t know who most of these artists were when I began the project,” says New York-based photographer Ron Amato, whose portraits of Provincetown artists, writers, and performers in their studios, homes, and various places around town are the subject of a new book and accompanying exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

“I didn’t know the history,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons I started it. I wanted to get to know this place better.”

Curated by artists Midge Battelle and Pasquale Natale — both of whom are among Amato’s subjects — the exhibition includes portraits of 84 artists spanning generations and disciplines. In its subject and scale, the project continues the achievement of photographer Norma Holt (1918-2013), who photographed more than 100 artists, writers, poets, and other Outer Cape creatives. Her work was published and exhibited at PAAM as “Face of the Artist” in 1980.

“When I first saw her work, I was floored,” says Amato, who was introduced to Holt’s project by artist John Dowd. “I really got to know the history of Provincetown from that book. I used it as sort of a bible to find the artists who were still alive I wanted to photograph. I thought it was important to include as many of her subjects as I could.”

Amato eventually photographed 27 artists whom Holt had photographed nearly a half century before. “It was really important to me to get Pat de Groot,” he says. “It was toward the end of her life. The photograph of her that wound up in the book was the one that most captured her personality for me.” De Groot died in 2018.

Other artists in both collections include Paul Bowen, Barbara Cohen, Salvatore and Romolo Del Deo, Anne Packard, Marian Roth, and Bert Yarborough.

Along with Holt’s book, Amato relied on introductions to determine which artists to photograph for his project — which he acknowledges is incomplete. “I learned as I went,” he says. “Some artists would lead me to still other artists, and things grew from there. But I know I didn’t find everyone. In Provincetown, I think that would be impossible.”

While Holt’s influence is evident in Amato’s series, its strongest stylistic antecedent is American photographer Arnold Newman (1918-2006), who is regarded as the leading proponent of the concept of “environmental portraiture.” In portraits of celebrities, politicians, and artists of his day, Newman emphasized the settings and even objects associated with his subjects as much as the subjects themselves.

“Newman established the visual language of environmental portraits in the 20th century,” says Amato. “I really take my visual cues from him.”

In many ways, the photographs are about the physical spaces of the Outer Cape: the golden early morning light that envelops Jim Broussard on MacMillan Pier; the veritable landscape of detail in the brushes, tubes, and swatches of paint on Robert Henry’s well-worn studio workbench; the dune shack — at once sturdy and vulnerable — that frames Helen Grimm. The artists appear in active dialogue with their surroundings.

Determining the location for each portrait was collaborative. “I never dictated where I wanted to photograph anyone,” says Amato. “Before this project, the process was all about my decisions. These are more collaborative because I needed the artists’ peace of mind to be a part of the image. The emotional state they’re in when I’m making pictures is important.”

In many cases, Amato says, it just felt right to photograph artists where they worked. Accordingly, studio spaces figure prominently in the series. But some artists suggested other places in the environment that resonated with them. “Donald Beal took me to a place in the Beech Forest that inspired him,” says Amato. “Jim Broussard told me he often painted on the pier.”

Still other settings revealed themselves serendipitously. “Having Sue Goldberg pose in an alley in the center of town also just felt right somehow,” he says.

The project also chronicles Amato’s own relationship with Provincetown over the years. Unlike Holt, who was already a member of the Provincetown art community when she photographed her subjects, Amato began the project with the curiosity of an outsider.

Amato, a professor in the Photography and Related Media department at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, first visited Provincetown in 1999. Initially, his work here focused on nude male studies in the dunes and forests of the Outer Cape, a body of work for which he is perhaps best known. He made his first portraits of artists in 2015.

“I was restless, and I wanted to explore another aspect of the town,” says Amato. “I was photographing in nature for a very long time. Then I started moving indoors, which dovetailed into the artist project. It’s enabled me to explore more places in Provincetown than I’d known about before. Wanting to get to know the artist community here — and wanting them to get to know me — was a big motivation.”

“Artists of Provincetown” is both a personal achievement and an important historical document: a collective snapshot of Provincetown’s artist community at a particular point in time. “The book is important now,” writes Michael Cunningham (another of Amato’s subjects) in his introduction, “and it’ll be important in the future, as a record of those who found their way to a town on a remote spit of sand and produced work that will endure, even after its creators are gone.”

Amato echoes Cunningham’s view. “I hope it makes the artists in these photographs feel a stronger sense of the legacy they share and the community they’re part of,” he says. “I hope people in town who don’t know that this community exists among them will see it. And I hope that visitors who have a more casual relationship to Provincetown will see what’s here in a different way. I’m proud to be tied to making that happen.”

*Robert Henry* by Ron Amato. (All artist portraits courtesy Ron Amato)

Photographs by Ron Amato

The event: ‘Artists of Provincetown’
The time: Through Aug. 18; Wednesday through Monday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Fridays to 8 p.m. (closed Tuesdays)
The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
The cost: $15 general admission; free on Fridays from 5 to 8 p.m.; see paam.org

RETROSPECTIVE

Through Andrew de Lory’s Viewfinder

The photographer’s 60-year career started at Nauset High School

By Aden Choate Jun 5, 2024

If you were to flip through Andrew de Lory’s portrait photographs, you might come face to face with Prince Charles playing polo or Odetta, eyes closed, serenading an unseen crowd at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. You might see a young Vietnamese woman frozen in a moment of arrival, the white of her traditional silk ào dài contrasting the muted grays of the sky, the rubble, and the U.S. Army transport vehicle that surround her.

Hundreds of such portraits — mostly in black and white but sometimes filtered with deep red or cerulean blue — compose de Lory’s oeuvre, which spans six decades, several continents, and his experience as a noncombatant photojournalist in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.

“I approached photography with the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s attitude that no people are uninteresting and the idea that everyone had their own soul and honest moments to share,” says de Lory, 77, who grew up in Orleans and now lives there again.

De Lory has captured politicians, sailors, football stars, Orthodox Jews, and a host of figures from the Vietnam War era in unguarded moments: singing, laughing, embracing, staring. Few portrait subjects meet the camera’s eye directly, but when they do, it’s like having the wind knocked out of you.

Thirty-five of his portraits were recently displayed in a retrospective exhibition, “Portraits — Local and Global,” at Snow Library in Orleans. De Lory hopes the exhibition will become an annual event. In the meantime, he continues to photograph subjects on the Outer Cape while compiling a book of back stories to go with his images.

His photographs powerfully evoke the curiosity and generosity of artistic vision that originated for him with a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera and early mentorship from the artist Vernon Smith and from Jim Owens, an art teacher at Nauset High School.

“It was the first time I’d seen photographs as art,” says de Lory, remembering a day when Owens, also a photographer, brought a stack of his own photographs to class.

After that, de Lory experimented, taking photos of friends and acquaintances with a 4×5 large-format viewfinder camera. One of the results is a portrait of the artist Helen Miranda Wilson, shot in Wellfleet in 1963 under a lilac.

“I think she was 15 at the time,” he says. “We met through mutual friends and all of us used to get together and swim in the local ponds. What you see in the print is how I composed it in the viewfinder.”

*Helen Miranda Wilson, Wellfleet, MA, 1963.* (Photos courtesy Andrew de Lory)

That approach to composing — capturing the entirety of the moment of encounter without later cropping — runs through de Lory’s work and underscores his representational aspirations.

“It is almost an intuitive process,” he says. “I’m looking for honest moments in people’s faces and composing well in the context of the setting.”

Such a photograph captures de Lory’s friend and fellow “art nerd” Dan Joy, the grandson of Vernon Smith, in 1965, the year they graduated from Nauset High. Flakes of ice and snow dust a banded leather cap as Joy’s eyes lock on something to the left and slightly outside the frame. De Lory notes that, almost 60 years later, Joy still has an impressive hat collection.

In those early days, de Lory also photographed older, more established Cape Cod characters like the author and naturalist John Hay, who cofounded the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, which de Lory visited as a child.

“There were guided field walks in marshes, at shoreline, in tide pools, and birdwatching,” says de Lory. “It was then, with Hay’s inspired teaching, that I began to have a reverence for nature and all living things.”

Influenced by Hay and his 1963 book The Great Beach and by Henry David Thoreau, de Lory walked from Eastham to Provincetown as a teenager. “I think we really started to bond after I made that walk,” he says. Hay wrote a recommendation letter for de Lory to supplement his application for conscientious objector status, which kept him out of combat in Vietnam but not out of the war.

*John Hay, Naturalist & Author, Bremen, Maine, 1970.*

Following nine months there, de Lory lived in London for several years. That’s how his portrait of Elliot Richardson came about. At the time, in 1975, Richardson was the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom for the Gerald Ford administration following several positions in — and a highly publicized resignation from — Richard Nixon’s cabinet.

To escape the intensity of Washington, D.C., Richardson came to stay at a house in Eastham. This Cape connection inspired a journalist friend of de Lory’s in Orleans to come to London to do a story — and he looped de Lory in on it. They visited the ambassador’s residence, Winfield House, and de Lory asked to stay and photograph the reception that followed. He kept an eye out for Richardson and finally captured him.

Elliot Richardson, U.S. Ambassador to United Kingdom, London, 1975.

“It was a rare moment, because for a few seconds he was kind of isolated in his own space, not interacting with anybody else,” says de Lory. “Everything came together — the composition, the expression, the lighting — and then he disappeared into the crowd.”

PHOTOGRAPHY

A House and Its Reflection

Robert S Johnson turns his focus on one house and the history of Blackfish Creek

By Abraham Storer Nov 29, 2023

Pleasant Point is a spit of land in Wellfleet that juts out into Blackfish Creek. It’s like Cape Cod or Provincetown in miniature: not a place you drive through, but a destination on the periphery. Photographer Robert S Johnson has had a relationship with this place since he was a child. His parents and uncle bought a house on a bluff overlooking Blackfish Creek in 1974, where he now lives with his wife, the writer Katherine Alford, for part of the year.

“There’s a strange collection of us here,” says Johnson of the Pleasant Point neighborhood. “I don’t know if the Point is weirder than most places, or if I just know it better.”

For Johnson, getting to know the Point in all its beauty and strangeness involved taking thousands of photographs. His most enduring subject has been a house by Pleasant Point Landing, a few houses down from his own.

“I’ve been photographing it for 15 or 20 years now,” says Johnson. The simple two-story structure with a wraparound porch sits on a piece of land extending into Blackfish Creek. It’s another microcosm of a peripheral place. In a show opening on Dec. 1 at Wellfleet Preservation Hall, Johnson is exhibiting a selection of these photographs along with images of the surrounding environment.

Johnson’s penchant for photographing his immediate surroundings had a dramatic beginning.

“The first picture I remember taking was when I was about eight and we were in Yellowstone Park,” he says. “A bear was climbing on our car, and my parents freaked. I just grabbed my mother’s Brownie for some reason and took a picture of it.” As he grew older, Johnson began to photograph what was around him as a way to memorialize events — not unlike the way people use iPhones today, he says.

Photography remained a side interest for Johnson while he pursued a career in theater and then in the hotel industry, where he managed audio-visual systems for events. In 2011, he was unemployed and caring for Alford, who was recovering from breast cancer treatment. (Both Alford and Johnson are frequent contributors to the Independent.)

Robert S Johnson with some bounty from Blackfish Creek. (All photos courtesy Robert S Johnson)

“Katherine said, ‘Please just go out and do something; you’re driving me nuts,’ ” recalls Johnson. He started shooting the Hudson River, near their other home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Photography soon blossomed into a disciplined passion — and a new career.

In Johnson’s moody photographs of his Cape environs, the house on the creek often seems to float on the water. It appears as an ephemeral structure separated from the elements only by a concrete seawall. His emphasis on atmosphere further melds the house to its environment.

In one miraculous picture a rainbow seemingly cuts through the fragile blue silhouette of the house, which sits against a luminous pink sky. In another photo, the silvery tones of a still, cloudy day reverberate through the grays of the house’s shingles, siding, and dark shadows. The angles of the house echoing in a landform rising in the distance further connects the structure to the landscape. Yet, despite its integration with nature, the house also stands apart. Its rigid architectural lines are anomalous to the soft, organic lines and atmospheric light of its environment.

Because the house is thus separated from the landscape, it functions as a multidimensional symbol.

“It just juts out there, and if you shoot it correctly, it looks alone,” says Johnson. “Having spent winters in Wellfleet, that’s kind of how you feel.” His working title for the project was “Lonely House,” but it didn’t feel quite right. “It’s not lonely, because it’s surrounded by nature,” he says. Solitude is a word he lands upon that feels more accurate.

His final title, “Pleasant Point — Pain(e) Hollow,” draws on the somber history of Blackfish Creek.

“The work is dark,” says Johnson, “which surprises me, because Blackfish in the summer is nothing but bright and wonderful. But this is about life on Blackfish, tying all the way back to the 1880s blackfish massacre.” He’s referring to an event in 1884 when a school of about 1,500 pilot whales, commonly known as blackfish, were driven into Blackfish Creek. The whales were killed, their oil harvested, and the rich proceeds divided among 300 inhabitants of the town.

Night (1:15 a.m. — 8/14/15) by Robert S Johnson.

In the house’s anthropomorphic quality, Johnson references the uneasy relationship between humans and nature. Night (1:15 a.m. — 8/14/15) is perhaps his darkest image. Here the house is a dominating black shape against a starlit night. Johnson’s slow exposure casts a quivering blur over the image, recalling the area’s haunted history.

In other images, nature is dominant, even vengeful. For these, Johnson used a digital technique mimicking double exposure. In Shrouded Shanty, the house is overlaid with a tangle of beach roses, and in Unaware the house is just a shape filled with beach grass, dissolving into fog.

“No matter how hard you fight, nature is going to win,” says Johnson. “The planet will repair itself. We’re guests here.”

‘Pleasant Point — Pain(e) Hollow’

The event: Photography by Robert S Johnson
The time: Dec. 1, 2023 to Jan. 2, 2024; opening reception Thursday, Dec. 7, 5 to 7 p.m.
The place: Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St.
The cost: Free

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on Nov. 30, incorrectly reported the year that Johnson began pursuing photography as a career. It was 2011, not 2008.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Rowland Scherman Focused on Hope, Not Darkness

Talking his way into a job as the first Peace Corps photographer

By John Greiner-Ferris May 11, 2022

Ukraine, Covid, the GOP, the radical right’s takedown of the Supreme Court — take your pick, or feel free to add your own favorite bogeyman that keeps you up nights. Given the state of the world today, maybe the only thing that gets us out of bed in the morning is hope. Hope got us through 2008 with Shepard Fairey’s poster of Barrack Obama, and Rowland Scherman’s photographs, on view until June 26 at PAAM, give us another needed booster shot.

Photographer Rowland Scherman. (Photo by John Greiner-Ferris)

Scherman lived and worked primarily during the 1960s and ’70s, disruptive times reminiscent of today. He could have focused on the darkness: Southern police officers siccing dogs on Black demonstrators, or the drugs and carpetbagger record executives that infiltrated Laurel Canyon. Instead, he showed the world what dignity and fortitude looks like in his images of the march on Washington in 1963, and the innocence that still prevailed in the California music scene with Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins sitting together in a tree house.

Scherman portrayed the strength, resilience, joy, and beauty the human race is capable of, and isn’t that something we need to be reminded of now? How sometimes seriously flawed human beings — think of JFK and the contrast between Camelot and Vietnam, for example — could still manage to make the world a better place.

Edith Lee Payne, March on Washington, 1963, by Rowland Scherman.

Scherman became the first Peace Corps photographer in 1961. A debonair young man with a pipe is what he looked like. “That’s what I hoped I looked like,” he says. “Determined” is how he describes himself.

“Like jillions of other people,” says Scherman, “I was bowled over by Kennedy’s speech about asking what you could do for your country.” Legend has it, and he says it’s true, that he found the name of the Peace Corps public relations person, took a bus to D.C., barged in on the nascent organization, something that you couldn’t even think of doing today, and said, “Here I am. I’m Rowland Scherman. I’m a photographer.”

“I wasn’t a photographer,” he says now. “I was taking pictures of out-of-work actors in the Village. I didn’t know much, but I knew I wanted to do something.”

“We don’t need a photographer, kid,” was the Peace Corps official’s response. Actually, they did need a photographer — they just didn’t know it. And because Scherman stuck around, he ultimately was given an assignment that led to access to some of the most historic political and cultural events of the time.

That job was the start of a career that saw his pictures of some of the most celebrated people of the era published in Life and other magazines. “I know I’m a good portraitist,” he says of the secret to his successful career. Portraits are pretty much all he does. Try finding a landscape by Rowland Scherman. “They’re around,” he says. “Maybe in the basement.”

His pictures always reveal an engagement with the subject, even during sublimely intimate moments when the subjects are seemingly unaware of Scherman, like the shot of Arthur Ashe doing his laundry, or Mississippi John Hurt sitting on a bed, playing to a little boy.

Mississippi John Hurt, by Rowland Scherman.

Scherman, who turned 85 on April 30, is a wonderful storyteller, still very much engaged in the world. He’s keen on the iPhone, what its camera is capable of producing, and how it’s given everyone the ability to be a photographer. It’s easy to see that his images are as much a result of his personality and curiosity as his technical ability.

Passion and duty to country motivated Scherman to get on that bus to the Peace Corps office, but still, he was young and needed money. Was making photographs a political act for Scherman?

“Most of the time, I’d like to say it was; most of the time it was a job, it was paying the rent,” he says. “It was maybe growing into an iconic lensman like some of the people I was dealing with when I was a darkroom flunkie at Life magazine: the great Gordon Parks, and of course [Alfred] Eisenstadt. These Life guys weren’t even my favorites.”

Scherman says his list of favorite photographers changes, but always includes Jacques Henri Lartigue.

“He started photographing when he was six, and was still photographing when he was 90, and he lived through the whole century,” says Scherman. “He did a book called Diary of a Century, and he was there for everything. And it turns out I was sort of like that. What’s happened is the pictures I did 50 years ago have gathered a lot of gravitas. So, now all these pictures that were for me just doing a job have turned into an icon of an era, which I think is kind of neat.”

PHOTOGRAPHY

In ‘Sticks and Stones,’ Gershon Stark Explores Harmful Words

A Provincetown exhibit searches behind symbols and surfaces

By Susannah Elisabeth Fulcher Apr 14, 2021

“In the Jewish tradition, the most harm one person can do to another is through lashon hara, which means ‘evil tongue or speech’ in Hebrew,” says Jonathan Gershon Stark, who usually goes by his middle name. “Lashon hara is considered to be worse even than murder, because a person’s sense of self is killed over and over again instead of just once.”

Gershon Stark in Provincetown. (Photo Susannah Fulcher)

Stark has an ongoing photographic project he calls “Sticks and Stones,” which will be on view at a pop-up exhibit at Gallery 444 in Provincetown from April 18 to May 2, with an opening on Friday, April 23. It is meant to raise awareness of the prevalence and power of verbal abuse.

Abusive language, Stark says, does not have to be direct or include expletives. Subtle words, spoken just once, such as “Why are you so sensitive?” or “You are difficult to love,” are internalized. “My mission,” Stark says, “is to bring attention, in an artistic way, to this trauma.”

For “Sticks and Stones,” Stark, who is based in Providence, R.I., often takes photographs of participants against a backdrop of handwritten words of torment. Other images show the participant with the words that emotionally scar them inscribed on their skin. These are perhaps the most powerful.

Worthless III is an archival digital print from 2015. The young woman in this photograph was Stark’s first “Sticks and Stones” subject. “At the end of the shoot,” he says, “I realized I would start to work on this as a long-term project.” (Photo courtesy Gershon Stark)

In the words of fellow artist Michaela Clift, which Stark includes in the exhibit, “When someone verbally abuses you, it comes down to your skin. It does not matter what clothes you are wearing.” Stark also invited his friend and fellow artist Johnny Rivera to work on some of the photos. “He added a dimension of color, playfulness, and, at times, darkness,” Stark says.

The project has been cathartic for many of Stark’s subjects. Their visible reactions, he says, speak to how deep the pain caused by verbal abuse can run. He works with each of his subjects for as long as it takes for them to become comfortable enough to express the emotions evoked by certain words.

One woman, for example, had been told long ago that she was “not good enough.” Stark documented the words’ effect by writing them on her body one at a time. “First, I wrote good and asked her to express what she felt,” he says. “Then, I wrote not good, and asked her what it is like to be not good.” With those words, “You can be a rebel, and revel in that.” Finally, he wrote the entire phrase, not good enough, and she opened up to reveal the underlying hurt.

Stark was born in the Bronx, N.Y. Some of his earliest memories are of being transfixed by people in the subway. “I took the train with my mom down to Central Park in Manhattan,” he says. “I can still remember kneeling on the seat next to her, staring alternately at the faces, shoes, bodies, clothing of the people on the train. Every shape, size, color, and attitude.”

Shattered I is a 2020 silver gelatin print by Gershon Stark, part of his “Sticks and Stones” exhibit in Provincetown. (Photo courtesy Gershon Stark)

After his parents’ painful divorce, Stark lived as a teen with his aunt and uncle on Long Island, where he developed a love for the ocean. “I discovered surfing, and spent five years in the water, winter and summer. I became this weird mix of urban Jew and rocking surfer,” he says. His uncle saw his interest in art and gave him his first 35 mm camera. “A roll of film later, I was hooked,” Stark says. “I would walk around Lower Manhattan, photographing Italian men playing bocce and old women sitting on milk crates. I am, at heart, an artist who needs to engage the world directly.”

Stark studied photography and sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton, then took a master’s in film and broadcasting at Boston University. In his photography, he seeks to reveal the depths and layers underneath the surface we ordinarily perceive. Past work includes a “Zipper Project,” exploring what we wear on our bodies and the intimacies that are concealed, and “Skin Deep,” celebrating the human form.

Why Can’t You Be More is a silver gelatin print from 2021. The woman in the photograph still reels from the criticism she once was given. “I could feel the exhaustion and sadness of this,” Stark says. (Photo courtesy Gershon Stark)

A recent project called “Security” was inspired by Stark’s observation that security guards are most often seen “as automatons or servants” in our culture. He interviewed them and learned that “most were on their way to other careers and that their security job was just a way to pay the bills.” Stark invited them to come into his studio and pose — first, in their uniforms; then, in their own clothes. The transformation is startling, showing the extent to which a person’s humanity can be stripped by roles and uniforms.

Stark was married in Provincetown 10 years ago and visits regularly with his wife and young daughter. “Our hearts are here,” he says. He considers himself a devout Jew, and he sees his art as part of tikkun olam, the Jewish theological obligation “to make the world a better place — to restore its beauty.” He says that “Sticks and Stones,” which he hopes to expand and exhibit widely, is his “humble attempt to make a small contribution in that direction.” (Stark continues to seek participants for “Sticks and Stones”; contact him at starkview.com.)

“Ultimately,” Stark says, “in spite of the initial loss of power we can suffer as a result of how we were perceived, spoken to, and treated by others, we can, by embracing our vulnerability, through prayer, love, lovemaking, and art, find true power, the power over the only person we can have power over — ourselves.”

Body Language

The event: “Sticks and Stones,” a pop-up exhibit of photography by Gershon Stark

The time: April 18 through May 2; daily, noon to 6 p.m., Friday till 8; opening reception, Friday, April 23, 4 to 8 p.m.

The place: Gallery 444, 444 Commercial St., Provincetown

The cost: Free

PHOTOGRAPHY

In View This Week

By The Independent Apr 7, 2021

The witch hazel is in bloom. (Photo Edwin Butter)

Front row seats are now ready for sunset worshippers at Great Hollow Beach in Truro. Left to right: Lee Russell, Jeff Holway, and Chris Lucy of the Truro DPW set up the new benches and fencing last week. (Photo Nancy Bloom)

Pilings by the Coast Guard Pier in Provincetown. (Photo Elizabeth Brooke)

PHOTOGRAPHY

Wellfleet’s Susan Wilson Tells of Shooting Stars

A show of her work honors women musicians

By Saskia Maxwell Keller Mar 24, 2021

If you were to walk down Tremont Street in Boston, you’d come upon a digital show of photographs of women musicians on the marquee of the Boch Center. They’re by Susan Wilson, and they’re on display in March as part of Women’s History Month.

For those of us sheltering in place on the Outer Cape, “the big city” may feel worlds away. But one thing links us directly to the exhibit: Wilson herself.

“I have, since childhood, been in love with Cape Cod,” says Wilson from her Wellfleet home. She has split her time between here and Cambridge since 1990. Growing up in Madison, N.J., she would regularly visit the Cape in the summer.

“History, art, and music have always been a big part of my life,” she says. Wilson went to Tufts three times — for her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in history. While going for her graduate degrees, she learned that her scholarship could be applied to classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. So, she got a used 35mm camera and studied photography.

Patty Larkin, photographed by Susan Wilson.

After a year of shooting, a guest lecturer at one of her classes approached her and asked whether she’d be interested in writing about and photographing women musicians for a new women’s newspaper. That’s how she ended up working for Equal Times and Sojourner.

Though photography was relatively new to Wilson, music wasn’t. She’d “flunked piano,” she says, then took up ukulele and, finally, guitar, and was part of the first all-women rock band at Tufts. “You really have to play music to write about it,” says Wilson. But she’d gotten most of her music fix vicariously.

“They’re all nuts, and so am I,” says Wilson of musicians. “I just think they’re really interesting people, and most musicians are doing it because they love it, not because someone said, ‘Hey, that’s a good way to make a living.’ They’re people who live on the edge.”

When she was starting out, photographing at Club Passim, she became friends with “an aspiring musician” and traded publicity photos for guitar lessons. That friend is Patty Larkin, whose image is featured in the Boch Center show. Coincidentally, Larkin later moved to Wellfleet.

“I was shooting all these musicians, and, within a couple of years, the Boston Globe called and asked if I would freelance” as a music critic, says Wilson. It was the ’70s and ’80s, with women musicians coming into their own, and the Globe’s chief rock critic, Steve Morse, saw the need for a woman’s voice. “If a man went out and panned a woman musician, he was called sexist,” Wilson says. “If I went out and panned a woman musician, I would just be called stupid.”

Tracy Chapman, photographed by Susan Wilson.

One of the first musicians she reviewed for the Globe was Tracy Chapman. “I don’t believe in discovering people,” says Wilson, but with Chapman, she essentially did. At the time, Chapman didn’t have money for publicity photos, so, in exchange for a shoot, she “agreed to paint my studio and wax my car.”

Most of the photos in the exhibit are pre-digital. Today, shooting is easier, Wilson says, but it’s harder to secure permission. And there are often limitations: you can shoot only the first two songs in a concert, or only from a certain area. If the musician isn’t too famous, you might be able to go backstage.

Concert photography is an especially difficult genre for two reasons: lighting and movement. In order to capture a dark stage, with moving subjects in a spotlight, you need to use sensitive film, which requires a steady hand. “It’s amazing that anyone got anything in focus,” says Wilson.

It also requires thick skin. “Did I ever get yelled at? Yes,” says Wilson. The photographer’s job is “a very focused thing. You experience the concert differently. You need to remember to step back and enjoy being there.”

Wilson got to shoot Tina Turner in the early part of her solo career. It was at the Bradford Hotel in 1981. This was pure luck, Wilson says, as it was “before she hit it big” with “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” The sound of the camera clicking, which can be distracting, wasn’t an issue: “Tina Turner was so damn loud, no one would notice,” Wilson says.

Tina Turner, photographed by Susan Wilson.

The work kept her busy. Sometimes, Wilson says, she’d be reviewing a concert for the Phoenix and shooting photos for the Globe.

Wilson’s favorite concert? The Newport Folk Festival of 1985. She got a backstage photo of Judy Collins, Joan Baez, and Mimi Fariña, Baez’s sister. There was “an amazing lineup,” Wilson says, including Bonnie Raitt, Arlo Guthrie, and Taj Mahal.

These days, Wilson is mostly retired. Several years ago, she segued into shooting classical musicians. In some ways it’s easier, she says, since “Yo-Yo Ma isn’t going to do something as crazy as Tina Turner.” But classical concertgoers are especially fussy about noise.

Susan Wilson. (Photo courtesy Susan Wilson)

“I felt very lucky to have come into this in 1977,” says Wilson. It was just as second-wave feminism was hitting the United States. “Part of my mission was to expose what was a new phenomenon: women emerging in control of their careers.

“We’re not equal yet,” she adds. “But we’re working on it.”

Sister Act

The event: “Women Who Rock”

The time: Throughout March

The place: Boch Center marquee, 270 Tremont St., Boston

The cost: Free

GALLERIES

Angela Russo Sees Provincetown Through a Unique Lens

Her colorful photography and sensibility make her gallery a destination

By Howard Karren Jul 23, 2020

“I love this place,” Angela Russo says of Provincetown. Russo is a photographer and the gallerist of Angela Russo Fine Art/Karilon Gallery, the cozy art-bedecked space at 447 Commercial St. in the East End that she has managed since 2005.

“It’s like no other,” Russo continues. “You have to be a part of Provincetown, somehow, to feel and understand it. You don’t get these kinds of images from staying here a few days or a week. I like to observe things. I plan a lot of my shoots — I don’t just go out there and do it.”

Russo is a great talker — she makes her points with charm and humor and extraordinary emphasis. She encapsulates with ease, and she’s passionate about what she likes.

At the gallery, she sells prints of her photographs, which she produces digitally on fine, exotic papers and other surfaces, such as canvas. She also sells the impressionist oil paintings of centenarian Ilona Royce Smithkin, the “ilon” of “Karilon,” and the erotically charged male figure paintings of Bruce Sargeant, the satirical persona (and queer riff on John Singer Sargent) of artist Mark Beard.

Like most of the people who settle in Provincetown, Russo has a story. Her journey to becoming an art photographer, master printer, gallerist, and home owner in this town and the South End of Boston is filled with personal setbacks, unique achievements, and acquired smarts.

Bangs Street, by Angela Russo, is a reflection of Provincetown at its ramshackle roots. (Photos Angela Russo)

She hails from Canastota, a small town in upstate New York. “When I was a teenager, I used to start rumors about myself for fun, to see how they’d recirculate,” Russo says. “A lot of the people I grew up with turned out to be gay. None of us knew at the time. None of us was out. A lot of them died of AIDS.

“I have four older brothers,” Russo continues. “I’m the accident. I am the only girl. I was a change-of-life baby. I popped out of my mother when she was 42. I was always astonished when somebody had a young parent. That kind of made me an adult more rapidly. I was my mother’s confidant. She and my father really didn’t get along, though they stayed together. It’s Catholic, baby. It’s kind of like a dare.”

Russo left for college in Boston at age 18 and didn’t look back. “From the last year of high school, I was shooting film,” she says. “I already knew how to process film.” She started working at a professional camera and equipment store to make ends meet, though the men that worked there weren’t so sure about it. Russo says she was told, “ ‘Would you like a job? I have to talk to the guys about it, because we’ve never hired a woman. I have to see if they’ll allow that.’ They called me back. ‘You’re hired.’ ”

Russo is proud of her success as a woman in the photography world at a time when the discrimination was fierce. She worked as a photographer’s assistant, then cultivated a career on her own, shooting ads for Filene’s, Neiman Marcus, Clinique, Lacoste. “I had Ralph Lauren when they had cosmetics,” Russo says. “I had big corporate clients.”

She also shot, under a pseudonym, for Gay Community News, an influential Boston weekly in the late ’70s. “I’m part of the history of the gay community,” Russo says.

Harlequin Marsh is part of Russo’s “Moderns” series, which highlights her original use of digital effects.

Her life has been punctuated by medical crises. She got colon cancer at the age of 31 and survived. She fell on a loading dock and seriously injured her leg and lower back. She’s had car accidents that weren’t her fault and seven spine fusions. She had a brain aneurism in 2008 that was first diagnosed as a brain tumor. “It’s been an awful trial of a life,” Russo says.

Whenever she was laid up, she’d study photography — the equipment, the printing processes, the techniques. When digital started taking over the industry, she embraced it, learning everything she could.

“I went back to school, to the New England School of Photography, just for the digital work,” Russo says. “I was 40 with 20-year-olds, and I was very unhappy about it. I started retouching, layering, color-correcting. Very intensive. Took more classes. Started buying equipment. I’m kind of like a machine wizard, okay?”

She also started showing her work and thinking in terms of art photography. That led her to settle down in Provincetown, buy a house, and take on the Karilon Gallery.

Russo collects vintage contact printers that she fills with dioramas enacting gay murder mysteries, such as the one seen here.

“I’m into the work,” Russo says. “You know how many years it took me to print on those crazy papers? It’s my edge — color. Color makes me crazy. I want it to look like you want to eat the color. I want it to be absolutely luscious but real. I come from transparency film. Slide film. I’m going at the art of it from the scientific end. That’s my artist’s statement.”

Russo collects vintage box cameras that she fills with dioramas enacting gay murder mysteries, such as the one seen here.

Russo is also a bit of a collector. She owns many vintage contact printers, for example, that she fills with miniature dioramas depicting gay murder mysteries. She’s shown them, photographed them, sold them, and contemplates trying it again here in Provincetown.

“All of what I do comes from my upbringing, my hardships, all that I’ve lived through,” Russo says. “I’ve got to have quality: that’s my driving force. Very few people would spend on ink what I spend. Can you even tell that my work is varnished? Twice? You can’t even see it. It has to be.”

MASKED

All Eyes on Commercial Street

Sitting, strolling, and rolling through summer , behind a mask

By Edward Boches Jul 16, 2020

On a hot Sunday in July, a walk down Commercial Street in Provincetown brought photographer Edward Boches mask-to-mask with a slow summer-paced wave of humanity. Whether seated in the shade, walking determinedly, spinning slowly, or rolling to a soft electric hum, people were all eyes. It was rare to see anyone unmasked.

Science Meets Art in Dan Ranalli’s Compositions

The Wellfleet photographer takes Broto into the future

By Susannah Elisabeth Fulcher May 7, 2020

Photographer Daniel Ranalli stands by work from his recent series. (Photo Tabitha Vevers)

In the course of an artist’s lifetime, a recurrent theme may emerge almost of its own accord, with an urgency that cannot be ignored. That has certainly been the case for Daniel Ranalli, whose photographic works over the past few decades have repeatedly, and with increased focus, drawn attention to the effects of climate change on our planet and the Outer Cape in particular.

Ranalli is one of the artists taking part in Broto, the annual art-science-climate conference that was originally scheduled to happen live in Provincetown on May 16-17, with paid admission to its panels and workshops. Because of the current stay-at-home directives, director Ian Edwards took Broto online, and it will unfold virtually on the same dates, with free access worldwide (register at broto.eco). Ranalli is part of a panel on Saturday, May 16, at 2:30 p.m. titled “Time as a Muse,” along with artist Elena Soterakis, sculptor Jonathan Latiano, and Julia Buntaine Hoel, founder of SciArt Initiative.

Climate change, says Ranalli, has been a “thread in my work going back a long way.” His many photographic series, such as Snail Drawings, Zen Dunes, and Whale Strandings, arise from his deep interest in the natural world and the passing of time.

In 1995, Ranalli created an image of the Provincetown Monument with its base underwater, a startling vision of rising sea levels. It has since become a familiar local icon.

“I originally did the piece for an auction at the Fine Arts Work Center,” he says. “I titled it Provincetown Monument: High Tide July 2024, a date which, at that time, felt like the very distant future. That date stuck with me, so about 10 years later, I did the first in my Remapping Series of Cape Cod, where I show what the Cape would look like if the sea level rose 10 feet.”

Ranalli has since created similar maps for this year’s Broto conference. “Ian wanted to look 400 years ahead to 2420, as a reflection of the 400 years since 1620, when the Pilgrims first encountered Cape Cod,” Ranalli says. “I decided to do a 20-foot rise in sea level, which turns the Outer Cape into an archipelago, with just the scattering of a hundred islands.”

Originally from coastal Connecticut, Ranalli grew up in a blue-collar household and came to art after dropping out of a Ph.D. program in economics. With a career spanning more than 40 years, Ranalli has work in dozens of museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

He discovered Cape Cod in the 1980s, when he was hired as the second executive director of the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. “I summered in Truro for three years and was completely smitten by the Cape and its beauty,” Ranalli says. He helped to set up the precursor to the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater while living in a dune shack above Newcomb Hollow — a shack that has since collapsed into the sea — and bought his Wellfleet home by the bay in 1986.

He became an associate professor of art history at Boston University in 1988 and founded the graduate program in arts administration there in 1993, all the while spending as much time as he could on the Cape. “My work changed once I got here,” he says. “I had been doing very abstract work and started doing pieces that came about by walking the beaches and building constructions out of seaweed and stones, knowing that they were going to wash away in the incoming tide.”

In 2011, Ranalli began his ongoing Daily Observances project, for which he walks from his home every morning at 7 a.m. to the bayside bend on Kendrick Avenue to take a photograph. “Everybody in Wellfleet has driven by that corner,” Ranalli says. “It always causes your glance to move toward it. I’m lucky that I live less than a 10-minute walk away. Every morning, I notice how different the sky is, how the waterline changes. In a way, it is the simplest possible construction of an image, composition-wise. In some frames, the water is as smooth as a mirror.”

The series builds on the idea of paying close attention, Ranalli says: “That is one of the things artists do, photographers do — pay attention.”

Since his retirement in 2015, Ranalli, who is represented by the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown and Gallery Kayafas in Boston, spends more than half the year in Wellfleet with his wife, artist Tabitha Vevers. Recently, he has been working on a series titled Fire and Ice, which matches NASA satellite photographs of wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and glacial calving with his own photographs, taken on Cape Cod.

Four Fires--Four Nests--Four Hurricanes — Part of his Fire and Ice Series, Daniel Ranalli’s Four Fires — Four Nests — Four Hurricanes (2019) frames the fearful symmetry of his own images and those captured by NASA satellites.

“I’ve always thought that NASA satellite pictures were incredibly beautiful, and I always wanted to do something with them by integrating them with my own work,” Ranalli says. One montage in the series juxtaposes Ranalli’s images of birds’ nests with satellite imagery of hurricanes and fires. “I was thinking of birds, descendants of dinosaurs, which have gone extinct, and that it is reasonable to assume that humans will probably go extinct as well,” he adds.

Despite his contemplating the demise of our species, Ranalli has not given up hope. Like other observers, he sees a silver lining for our planet in the current pandemic.

“There are satellite photographs showing much less air pollution,” Ranalli says. “Maybe people working from home will become the norm, saving on commuting. I believe we do have a chance to rearrange the way we live on this planet, and there are an awful lot of people who want to do that.”

books

Joel Meyerowitz’s Provincetown Through a Local Lens

Photographs in search of a lost time

By Susan Rand Brown Nov 27, 2019

“Wendy,” 1976, by Joel Meyerowitz, from the book Provincetown. This is shot at Dairy Land on Shank Painter Road (now Mac’s Fish House). (All photos courtesy Aperture Foundation and Joel Meyerowitz)

Photographer Joel Meyerowitz — Joel Meyerowitz. (Photo Street Hunters)

Eighty-one-year-old Joel Meyerowitz, éminence grise among Provincetown photographers, was in Manhattan in late October. The occasion was a narrated slide show and book signing hosted by Aperture, his publisher, at its Chelsea gallery, which was packed. Out since Sept. 24, Meyerowitz’s new 160-page monograph, sized for a coffee table, is titled, simply, Provincetown.

After talking about his pioneering 1960s New York street photography, Meyerowitz moved on to Provincetown, in which summer’s sky and sea serve as idealized settings for all manner of dress, undress, and sun-frosted skin. The book is a time capsule of portraits of the town’s colorful denizens in the late ’70s and early ’80s as they respond to the novelty of a six-foot-plus photographer standing behind a Deardorff 8-by-10 view camera on a tripod. Given the time period, and those lost to AIDS, certain portraits hold a special resonance. The cover image, “Darrell,” is of a black man in a tight brown-and-white-striped one-piece garment. Meyerowitz describes him as a dancer.

Meyerowitz Packard and daughters — “The Packard Family,” 1981, by Joel Meyerowitz. Painter Anne Packard (in white hat), a neighbor and friend, poses with her three daughters (Cynthia, Leslie, and Susan).

By the mid-’70s Meyerowitz’s work was evolving. “I decided to switch to a large format camera, the antithesis of a street camera,” he says, speaking by Skype from his home in Tuscany. His close friend Murray Reich suggested that he go to Provincetown. Reich, Meyerowitz says, described the locale as “just like 8^th Street in Greenwich Village — full of interesting people, Portuguese fishermen, an artists’ colony, lots of playwrights, musicians, poets.” Meyerowitz, a long-distance swimmer, came to town during the winter of 1976 with his son, Sasha, and Reich. “I immediately went to a real estate agent, signed for an East End summer rental. The first pictures I made with the 8-by-10 camera were made on Cape Cod,” Meyerowitz says excitedly in his high-pitched, raspy voice.

Eventually, he would buy a beachfront cottage (sold in 2016) and befriend Christopher Busa and Ray Elman, co-founders of what became the Provincetown Arts Press. From the mid-’80s through 1993, Meyerowitz regularly did cover portraits for Provincetown Arts without charge (Stanley Kunitz, Robert Motherwell, Norman Mailer, Annie Dillard) as a “gesture of support for the arts community,” Elman says, speaking by phone from Miami.

Provincetown is a record of the photographer’s 35-year love affair with the town, beginning when such landmarks as Dairy Land, with its extravagant neon, ruled Shank Painter Road. Meyerowitz captured this quintessential example of Americana as his hero, Robert Frank, might have, but in bright color. Several images in the book are taken from other Meyerowitz volumes; most are previously unpublished. And if, as Meyerowitz asserts, individuals posed themselves, the lighting and composition are reminders of his brilliant use of color, pattern, and design.

Redhead Sarah MacDonnell — Actress Sarah MacDonnell, then in her teens, posed for Joel Meyerowitz for this untitled shot and others in the book Redheads.

In pursuit of subjects, Meyerowitz posted an ad in the Provincetown Advocate: “Remarkable People! If you feel you were remarkable because of a birthmark, scar, personal experience, etc., or know someone remarkable, I’d like to make your portrait.” Most subjects, however, were discovered on the street. Julia Goodman, speaking by phone from Boston, recalls working in a juice bar near the Governor Bradford when Meyerowitz approached, saying, “ ‘I’m working on a series of photos of redheads. Would you be willing to pose for me?’ ” Goodman was 16. “I was a shy person, really nervous,” she says. “I think he must have been aiming to capture the gawkiness, since that’s all I see when I look at the photo [in Redheads], with a giant scrape on my knee.”

During that same shoot, Meyerowitz had a Leica on hand for a Fuji promotional campaign. Goodman agreed that he could take some extra shots with the smaller camera, and later was paid $400 for it. She was thrilled. Her image would be displayed in Times Square and Madison Square Garden.

In Provincetown, Meyerowitz was shooting portraits as well as the seascapes and interiors for what would become his best-selling book Cape Light, originally published in 1979. It has since gone through multiple printings and has sold 150,000 copies, spawning posters and calendars. Other images would go into A Summer’s Day (1985), Redheads (1991), and now Provincetown. Why did it take so long to publish Redheads? The market for photography books was soft in the ’80s, Meyerowitz says. He eventually convinced Rizzoli it was time to publish Redheads — fortuitously, the publisher’s director was a redhead. “Rizzoli succumbed to the temptation,” he says, “and the book was very successful.”

Sarah MacDonnell is an actress and longtime East End resident whose beachfront family home is a short stroll from the property Meyerowitz owned. He photographed her in 1980, when she was in her teens. Images from that shoot appeared in A Summer’s Day, on the cover of Redheads, and now Provincetown. “These are beautiful portraits of a young woman,” MacDonnell says by phone from New York. But, she adds, she was never told when or where her image would be used. “Even if he didn’t know at the time the photo was taken,” she says, “you can call somebody, tell them their image will be on the cover of a book, and give them a copy. Or give them a copy of the photograph,” MacDonnell says. Still, at the Aperture opening, she and Meyerowitz reconnected with pleasure. They are part of each other’s life history.

“Darrell,” 1983, by Joel Meyerowitz, is the cover photo of the book Provincetown.

On notifying subjects, Meyerowitz says, “When I made the photographs back in the day, every single person that I spoke to, I took their name and address and told them it was likely I would be publishing these pictures or showing them. And if someone would say to me, I don’t want the image to be published, I would not take their photograph.”

Meyerowitz often speaks of finding “the figure of his truth” as a portrait photographer. “There can be a sense of anima, a spirit that is recognizable to me in a more profound way,” he says. “Those are moments of intimacy, in which otherness is communicated and shared…. I think photographers know how to harness this kind of elemental sensitivity, from person to person.”

OUTER CAPE PORTRAIT

Mike Wright: A Piece of the Sky

By Marnie Crawford Samuelson Nov 21, 2019

MIKE WRIGHT | SCULPTOR | PROVINCETOWN

I’ve been making sculpture with old found painted wood for 30 years now. In the mid-’90s I would be walking on the beach and trying to search for my materials like the old salvagers used to when there were wrecks washed up on the beach.

After major storms in the winter, I would hike out and find these great pieces of broken up old little boats and things. Maybe a shape would catch my eye, or the quality of the paint that was left on it after the wood’s been floating around in the sea and scrubbed by the waves in the sand and the salt. It had to have a patina that was exceptional, something that I could not create.

That lasted awhile. And then something changed. The wooden boats of the fishing fleet had disappeared. I had to resort to a different way of collecting. I drive a circuit around Provincetown in my Jeep, and I look between buildings and find what was the old funky Provincetown.

Now, there’s another element, too: dumpsters. One day I drove past what was Robert Motherwell’s house. It was being renovated by a new owner. The dumpster had just arrived, and there were some wonderful blue pieces of wood in there that Motherwell had painted himself. I asked and begged if I could please go into the dumpster and pick out some pieces of this fabulous Motherwell blue.

Motherwell blue really is like a piece of the sky. It’s just soft blue, but very vibrant. I try and add a little Motherwell blue and sneak it into all kinds of things that I create.

From years of collecting wood, I’ve got a good supply still, but it is starting to dwindle. The thing that I’m noticing now is that the dumpsters don’t offer much in the way of colorful painted wood. When the artists owned a lot of the houses, they would paint everything — the floorboards, the cabinets, the closets and doors, so you could find lots of fun colorful wood in the dumpsters. But that seems to be changing now that houses are renovated and the renovations are getting renovated. There’s what I call the “beiging of Provincetown,” where the wood colors are white, brown, gray, beige.

As an artist, I believe that I will always be driven to make something. To be making. So, if I pass 10 years out, will I still have enough materials? Absolutely. Yeah, that would be a wonderful goal: to just keep making until the end.

I live in Provincetown with my partner, Sheila McGuinness, and my two Boston Terrors, I call them, Kibbe and Kami. Life is good. I can’t be in a better place than I am right now. I am making art, eating vegetables from the garden, looking at my dahlias, and walking my dogs on the beach.

Listen to a four minute recording of Mike here.

The ‘Mama Gaze’ Reveals a Raw and Beautiful Reality

Photographs from the Eye Mama Project by mothers who are artists

The ‘Mama Gaze’ Reveals a Raw and Beautiful Reality

Photographs from the Eye Mama Project by mothers who are artists

Arthur Nichols’s Panoramic Vision

Looking closely at nature, a photographer finds abstract minimalism

Portraits of the Artists

Ron Amato’s photographs of Provincetown artists capture a creative community

Through Andrew de Lory’s Viewfinder

The photographer’s 60-year career started at Nauset High School

A House and Its Reflection

Robert S Johnson turns his focus on one house and the history of Blackfish Creek

Rowland Scherman Focused on Hope, Not Darkness

Talking his way into a job as the first Peace Corps photographer

In ‘Sticks and Stones,’ Gershon Stark Explores Harmful Words

A Provincetown exhibit searches behind symbols and surfaces

In View This Week

Wellfleet’s Susan Wilson Tells of Shooting Stars

A show of her work honors women musicians

Angela Russo Sees Provincetown Through a Unique Lens

Her colorful photography and sensibility make her gallery a destination

All Eyes on Commercial Street

Sitting, strolling, and rolling through summer , behind a mask

Science Meets Art in Dan Ranalli’s Compositions

The Wellfleet photographer takes Broto into the future

Joel Meyerowitz’s Provincetown Through a Local Lens

Photographs in search of a lost time

Mike Wright: A Piece of the Sky

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