The show sets more than 70 photographs in a house once owned by the activist and journalist who helped bring modern theater to Provincetown a century ago. Interior designer Ken Fulk, who now owns it, restored its rustic charm and turned the house into an arts center in 2020.

All the works are were naturally lit, except one group that Gene Tartaglia, director of the Provincetown Arts Society and curator of “Anthology,” installed over the dining room fireplace. Those images are yellow, with shadowy figures and forms suggesting stories or dreams. The artist lit some of them in a dark bathroom holding a flashlight in her mouth.

“One of the things that really moved me when I saw Susan’s work was the light, how special it was,” Tartaglia said. As he designed the show, he added, “it was important to recognize the light in whatever the series was and call it out.”

Mikula’s photographs — all Polaroids, most of them scanned and enlarged — have a vintage feel. Staged in the rooms and crannies of an historic house, they’re almost spectral. A visitor may glimpse a photo over a bed and momentarily see a window into the Cape’s past, or stop by a haunting image from the artist’s “Hawthorne Barn” series, shot during a 2017 residency in the building where abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann painted and taught in the mid-20th century.

“I could totally feel him there,” Mikula said.

The artist described the colors of original Polaroid prints as “fugitive.” They disappear. That stands for the film, too. Polaroid stopped manufacturing cameras in 2007 and shut down film production in 2008.

That installation above the fireplace, she said, “is the only evidence I have of using one of these kinds of films that you can’t get anymore. It’s historic.”

“Will Susan Mikula become the world’s last Polaroid artist?” Christopher Bonanos, author of the 2012 book “Instant: The Story of Polaroid,” wrote in a catalogue essay for Mikula’s 2013 exhibition “u.X” at George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco.

Polaroid Originals brought the film back in 2017. Mikula called the intervening years “a dark valley.” Still, she found old film and kept taking pictures.

“When you shoot digital on your camera, you could shoot 100 pictures and pick one from the 100. I would never have enough film,” Mikula said, “I try to game out an idea for a long time.”

Her aesthetic embraces volatility and chance. The old and new films she uses, and the old cameras (she has “a million,” she said), produce images marred by chemicals, streaked with light, and crackling with patterns of the film’s degradation.

Mikula fell for Polaroids as a child. She grew up in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and moved to Francestown, New Hampshire with her family at the age of 14, when her father, an airline pilot, was transferred to Logan International Airport. He was an avid photographer who had several Polaroid cameras.

“Maybe I was captivated as a child because you could watch [a picture] develop,” she said. “The light from the world and the chemicals meet in the mechanism which is the camera. That simple yet super-complicated idea might have been my first scientific understanding.”

She doesn’t use a tripod, but instead holds the camera during exposures that range from a fraction of a second up to five seconds.

“I am capturing time passing, my breathing, and the light moving, the earth moving,” she said.

The sense of breathing through time is tender and mortal. Mikula endured a bad bout with COVID-19 in 2020 that prompted an emotional plea from Maddow to viewers to be cautious.

The photographer lost her 92-year-old mother in 2022. These brushes with death have not changed her art, she said, but they have changed her.

“I am not afraid to say, ‘I love you’ to people who are not used to hearing that from me,” she said.

The photographer and Maddow have homes in Western Massachusetts and on the Outer Cape. A concurrent exhibition of Mikula’s work, “Moons of Neptune,” shot here over the last two years during the off-season, is up at Rice Polak Gallery. The title likens the blue, windy atmosphere on Neptune to that of the wintry Cape.

In both shows, every shot is high stakes — and not just because the film is chancy.

“Am I getting the feeling there? Am I getting it so that you can look at it, take it and synthesize it for yourself?” Mikula asked.

“That’s the 100%, when you look at it — not that you feel what I felt,” she said, “but that it triggers something in you.”

SUSAN MIKULA: ANTHOLOGY

At Mary Heaton Vorse House, Provincetown Arts Society, 466 Commercial St., Provincetown, through Sept. 10.www.provincetownartssociety.org/provincetown-arts-society, www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=213503528337373&set=a.129864980034562

SUSAN MIKULA: MOONS OF NEPTUNE

At Rice Polak Gallery, 430 Commercial St., Provincetown, through Aug. 30. 508-487-1052, www.ricepolakgallery.com/artists-exhibitions-provincetown-gallery/

Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com. Follow her @cmcq.