Bluffer’s Notes
The brilliant and varied photographic career of Joel Meyerowitz
Joel Meyerowitz is one of America’s most famous fine-art photographers.
He has been many things during his long career: a black-andwhite photographer capturing life on New York’s streets; a pioneering largeformat colour photographer; the official photographer documenting the aftermath of the 9/11 Manhattan terrorist attacks in 2001; and, more recently, a still-life photographer meditating on light and perception.
What kicked off his passion for photography?
After studying painting and drawing at Ohio State University, he began working as an art director and designer for an advertising company. In 1962, as part of one job, he watched legendary American photographer Robert Frank, who was then earning a living doing commercial work, shooting pictures for a booklet. Meyerowitz was so inspired by seeing him work that he returned to his office, told his boss he was leaving, and started a new career as a photographer.
What kind of work did he do?
His earliest work was black-and-white street photography, shot on the streets of New York using a Leica. He met contemporaries such as Garry Winogrand and Tony Ray-Jones and would go out shooting with them. However, feeling he wanted to “see more and experience more feelings from a photograph”, he started using colour film for his street photography in 1963. This work influenced other contemporaries, including William Eggleston, and he’s now regarded as a pioneer in the use of colour in art photography.
How did this work develop?
In 1976, wanting to create a different kind of image, he bought a 1938 Deardorff 10x8 view camera. Over the following two summers, he used it to shoot over 600 photographs at Cape Cod, on the Massachusetts coast. These contemplative, poetic colour studies were the complete opposite of his street work and marked a new direction in his photography. The resulting book, Cape
Light (1978), has sold over 150,000 copies to date. He has since published more than 20 books.
What other landmark projects has he done?
After the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, Meyerowitz spent six months at Ground Zero, documenting the epic scale of the destruction and the slow process of recovery. A travelling exhibition showing a selection of this work has been seen by over four million people worldwide. Other series include a major project to document public parks in his home city, published as Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks (2009).
What’s Meyerowitz’s latest book?
Titled Cézanne’s Objects, it’s a series of photographs made in the French artist’s studio in Aix-en-Provence. Most are still-life pictures of individual things owned by Cézanne, such as bottles, jugs and skulls. It was inspired by Meyerowitz’s discovery that the grey paint used on his walls gave the objects the flat, reflection-free appearance found in his paintings. Meyerowitz photographs each object in exactly the same way, inviting subtle comparisons in the quality of light falling on the object. It’s another stage in Meyerowitz’s continuing evolution as a photographer.