Cape Light

Joel Meyerowitz spent the summer of 1976 on Cape Cod shooting with a large-format view camera, and the photographs he made there became Cape Light, first published in 1978 and one of the most widely read and discussed books in the history of color photography. The images record the specific quality of light on the outer Cape at different times of day and season: the early morning blue cast on porches and screen doors, the saturated late-afternoon light on dunes and water, the particular stillness of an empty room in August. Meyerowitz was working at a moment when color photography was still widely considered less serious than black and white, and the book's sustained attention to color as a subject in itself was influential in changing that assessment.

This Museum of Fine Arts, Boston edition is the standard reprint of the original, with an introduction by Meyerowitz and a critical essay by Clifford Ackley. The book has remained continuously in print and continues to be assigned in undergraduate and graduate photography programs as a foundational text in color photography.