Exhibition - An Outer Cape Village: Photographs of Marnie Crawford Samuelson

Curator: Mike Wright

Fishermen, artists, and makers who live and work on Outer Cape Cod are the subjects of this photography and audio exhibition by Marnie Crawford Samuelson.

“This body of work is about people connected to this particular place. I have photographed the Outer Cape’s weather, its changing shores and dunes, and its dwellings and villages,” Crawford Samuelson writes. “I look for situations where a human being is immersed in the landscape (not just standing in front of it). That feels richest of all.”

Crawford Samuelson has been photographing on the Outer Cape since the mid-1980s. Her vintage toned black and white images show a Provincetown where neighbors gather for coffee and sodas at the counter at Adams Pharmacy, a poker game unfolds on a winter night in the West End, and neighbors and friends care for young men dying of AIDS.

More recently, she has been making a series of portraits of people who are deeply attached to place, to their work, family, neighbors, and community. These images, with accompanying first-person recordings, tell their unique stories. “Each is individual, but I like to think of them as one emerging portrait of daily life here in small villages by the sea, on the narrow lands between the Atlantic and Cape Cod Bay.”

Hers is a slow, documentary process. Often, she creates a simple outdoor studio environment for a photograph and invites the person being photographed to consider this as sacred time together. In a later recording session, she asks them to share something curious, authentic, and intimate.

About The Artist
Marnie Crawford Samuelson is a documentary photographer, multimedia producer, and storyteller. Her photographs have appeared in national magazines and in two books: Lasting Words with Claire Willis and The Wild Braid with poets Stanley Kunitz and Genine Lentine. She has directed and photographed several short films. She lives in Orleans, Massachusetts and Berkeley, California.  Samuelson graduated from Stanford University (B.A.), M.I.T (M.Sc), and Transom radio workshop.

About The Curator
Mike Wright has lived and worked in Provincetown since 1984 and for 30 years has exhibited her found wood sculptures in numerous solo, invitational, juried, and group exhibitions. Her work is in the permanent collections of Provincetown Art Association and Museum and Cape Cod Museum of Art, and many private collections. She is represented in Provincetown by Alden Gallery.

This exhibition is sponsored in part by John Douhan III and William Rawn.