The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Portfolio
RED INTERIOR, PROVINCETOWN, MASSACHUSSETTS, 1977, JOEL MEYEROWITZ
We love a mystery. This 1977 photograph by Joel Meyerowitz is rich with it. Why are those car doors open? What is happening out of camera shot? What is the story? Is anyone else thinking this could be a murder scene? Are there bodies already cooling in one of those wooden seaside huts? Or is that just a figment of an overactive imagination, one juiced by American crime fiction?
The latter seems likely. But it’s fun to speculate and this strange, beautiful image gives you plenty of space to do just that. It is just one image in hundreds that make up Where I Find Myself; a monumental, career-long retrospective of Meyerowitz’s photography that spans six decades. In its pages are politicians and lovers and disasters; a compelling vision of America and beyond. Meyerowitz is the ultimate New York street photographer, whose images of the city are bursting with people and sing with an exhausting energy and colour. But he could slow down too, as this picture suggests. “I learned that I had another photographic personality, one that was more contemplative,” he said of the images he made on his journeys around America. The jazzman making riffs on the street yielded to a slower, more classical way of seeing – and that added to my visual vocabulary new ideas of light, space and time.”