Foreword by Meera Subramanian
How might a single image capture the entirety of a human story? An impossible question, yet something wondrous emerges in the pursuit of an answer. You hold this wonder in your open hands. Photographer Julia Cumes, working in close collaboration with lighting director Lipe Borges, has created a stage for the oft-unseen members of Cape Cod’s global community to step onto, into the sweet light of this singular sweep of land.
The first time I stood before these large-format portraits, at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, I felt my feet rooting into the ground below me, unable to move. So much was going on within each frame. I leaned in. Each was exquisitely staged. Purposeful. Deliberate. Julia and Lipe used lighting to great effect. Each image exudes a mood, sparking a synesthesia that bridges the senses, twinning color and emotion. An elegant fuchsia. The cold blue of a past imprisonment. Ochre of the earth.
Eventually, I would force my feet to lift and shift to read the accompanying narrative, puzzle pieces settling into place. Julia’s vision was the opposite of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” where a photographer captures an effervescent moment. Instead, the images emerged through the participant’s own storytelling about how they had come to call this place of Cape Cod home.
Place. Home. Slippery words. Complicated words.
I was long overdue to cross paths with Julia when we both became Community Impact Fellows at Boston University’s Center for Media Innovation & Social Impact in the autumn of 2025. We were selected because our work—her photographs and my reported stories— aimed to reach beyond simple storytelling and wrestle with some of the harder realities of the moment we live in. Originally from South Africa, Julia washed ashore on the Cape (that’s the expression—“washashores”—for those of us not here for generations) back in 2001 for a summer photojournalism internship at the Cape Cod Times. When 9/11 upended her early career plans, she just...stayed. Lipe comes from beyond the nation’s borders, too. Love brought me to the Cape in 2010, and I, too...stayed.
Every resident here has their reason for coming. Some intentional and some capri- cious. Some arrived generations back. Some yesterday. This is a place of hard-won new beginnings, a land that didn’t exist until the last ice age left behind a curve of land that the People of the First Light first settled, where their Wampanoag descendants still live. At its sandy tip, in a place now known as Provincetown, the Mayflower pilgrims landed in 1620. Today, there is a such a mythos behind the notion of “Old Cape Cod”— seersucker suits and gin & tonics at sundown. A whisper of it might be true, but only for the thinnest sliver of the population. Mostly this place is stitched together by a web of mostly invisible humans who allow it to function, many of them newcomers, a fact too easily forgotten by the people whose forebears were once the hungry seekers. We live among waves upon waves of human settlers. Each arrival offers a chance for those of us already here to see our place from a fresh vantage. Julia has lifted her camera to help us see through their eyes.
Read the entirety of Meera Subramanian's foreword in Julia Cumes' Invisible Threads
Meera Subramanian
Meera Subramanian is an award-winning journalist and author who writes narrative nonfic- tion about home—in both the personal and planetary sense. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Nature, among many other publications. She is the author of A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis and a graphic novel for young adults, A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis.
Lipe Borges
Lipe Borges is a Brazilian-born photographer and lighting director based on Cape Cod. Borges brings a cinematic, narrative-driven approach to portraiture, using carefully constructed lighting environments to create images with emotional depth and psychological presence.
Julia Cumes
Julia Cumes is a South Africa–born, Cape Cod–based photographer whose work explores identity, migration, community, and human connection through collaborative, narrative-driven portraiture. Growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, she became aware early on of photography’s power to reveal truth, evoke empathy, and foster dialogue—an understanding that continues to inform her practice.
