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White cottages lined up along a road. A telephone booth lit against the dusk. A Ford station wagon parked beside the ocean. Laundry that the wind fills like sails. These pictures carry a taste of nostalgia, of seaside holidays, of vintage color, of a certain carelessness.

In 1976, Joel Meyerowitz is thirty-eight. For nearly fifteen years he has photographed the streets of New York in small format, at a thousandth of a second, in the vicinity of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. He already teaches color at Cooper Union. That year he receives a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and buys a view camera.

“I made a leap in the dark,” he writes in the new preface that opens this edition, “or as it turned out, a leap into the light.” He measures the cost of the gesture today. “For a Bronx-born street photographer, giving up the jazz-inflected rhythms and spontaneity of city life for an 8-by-10-inch view camera and the shadow-free luminosity of the outer Cape was a welcome, and subsequently life-changing, challenge.”

His camera, a Deardorff that left the workshop in 1938, the year of the photographer’s birth, repays attention. Meyerowitz admires its “shining mahogany face” and notes that the brass and leather carry the record of past outings “like the medals and decorations on the chest of an old veteran.”

The whole outfit weighs some forty-five pounds, to be carried across sand. A wide-field Ektar lens of 250 millimeters takes in slightly less than ordinary human vision. The film, a Vericolor II Type L rated at 80 ASA, was balanced for tungsten and called for a filter in daylight. Meyerowitz went without, correcting the color at the printing stage instead.

By day the exposure ran half a second at f/90, an aperture so narrow that everything holds sharp, from the foreground to the horizon. At the end of the day it stretched from four to ten minutes. “It’s not a film for horse races,” Meyerowitz remarks with amusement in the technical note that closes the book.

“For the first time in my life I slowed down, took a deep breath, and watched the slow, incremental movements of light and shadow cross a sandbar in the ebbing tide,” the photographer recalls, his eye fixed on “sunlight raking over clapboard siding.” He thinks of Edward Hopper, who painted these same shores for many years.

Out of that slow fever come discoveries about photography, and about himself. “How strange it was to find myself softening, and entering into moments of communion with such numinous and evanescent things.” The image forms on a ground glass, where the photographer composes it. Meyerowitz found a doorway there: everything held “the potential for new meaning, especially when seen upside down under the dark cloth of the view camera.”

Cape Light appeared in 1978 from New York Graphic Society, with an interview by Bruce K. MacDonald, then dean of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which exhibited the series that same year. By 2016, sales had already passed one hundred and fifty thousand copies.