TexasGirl Photography

A couple of years ago I treated myself to a copy of Joel Meyerowitz’s iconic book Cape Light. It became a little bit of an obsession, with me pouring over it each time I knew I was going to be visiting a beach, just to help get my brain in gear. I found a special connection with the photographs because many of them were made in and around where my favorite poet (Mary Oliver) spent a good portion of her life.

So, this year, when I found myself with the opportunity to visit my daughter in Nantucket, of course I turned to that photobook. The images were made around the time of my childhood, so while they were familiar to me and informed how my imagination considered the whole Cape Cod area (none of them were made on Nantucket, but I was going to visit the Cape too), I couldn’t help but wonder if I would find those kinds of scenes there or if the whole place was updated and commercialized into one big strip mall now.

I won’t keep you in suspense: I didn’t find the kinds of pictures my heart half-expected on Cape Cod. If anything, I found things I never would have expected, so unexpected that I’m still sort of it in a daze over it. That’s the pitfall of having expectations, I guess.

Nantucket, on the other hand, especially on the first evening at Jetties Beach, delivered that wonderful, otherworldly light I knew so well from Meyerowitz’s photographs. I even saw lifeguard chairs just like the ones in his book, although there were so many kids taking turns leaping off them into the sand that the above photo from afar was the best I could do.

Here let me turn to talking about the camera I used for these photos. In anticipation of the trip, and knowing that Polaroids, while I love them, can be finicky and don’t perform well at all in low light, I decided to get a Fujifilm Instax Square. What I wanted was an SQ6, with the capability of multiple exposures. This model is, sadly, discontinued, and I didn’t like the prices I saw for them on eBay. So I went with an SQ1 instead and it was an excellent decision if I do say so myself.

The SQ1 allowed me to have something relatively compact and lightweight with me that would fit fairly easily into a handbag. Its stellar photographic eye means that you can get good exposures even in evening light; even close up (above) it performs well. I really like the way that it translated the quality of the light I saw onto an instant photograph. Instax film in general seems to do very well with that task.

The film did well during the day, as well.

I have many MANY more photographs from the short time I spent on Nantucket (and on the Cape) but the ones I am sharing with you here today focus on water and the beach. It makes me happy to think that I was able to find what I was looking for photographically, even if it wasn’t located quite where I expected.

All of these instax square photos were scanned on my flatbed scanner, but I did very little to them besides spot clean and make sure the edges were cropped. Thank you for looking!