New York state of mind
The restless street photography of Bronx-born Joel Meyerowitz belies a more mindful, modern approach, as Steve Pill discovers
In the trailer for his Masters of Photography series of online workshops, Joel Meyerowitz claims that ‘photography looks like pictures but it’s really ideas’. The 82-year-old New Yorker may be responsible for some of the most defining images in the history of street photography, yet he remains one of the medium’s most thoughtful practitioners. Pre-empting recent trends for mindfulness, Meyerowitz has spent almost 60 years using his camera as a means to connect with the world while remaining present and alive to possibility. In doing so, he has been able to define his own identity and establish a remarkable career to date.
Meyerowitz shot his first Kodachrome roll in 1962. He’d been working as a junior art director for an advertising agency when a visit to Robert Frank’s studio inspired a career change almost overnight. For the next five years, he would trawl the streets of New York with his Leica, often alongside other future street photography legends Tony Ray Jones and Garry Winogrand. ‘We lived a few blocks from each other,’ Meyerowitz says of the latter. ‘We’d call each other and say “I’ll meet you at the greasy spoon at 96th Street and Columbus in 20 minutes...”.’
Whatever the problems in Meyerowitz’s life at the time, those morning meet-ups were an early reminder that all ills could be cured by photography. ‘As soon as I put on my coat and put film in my camera and went outside, I immediately felt better because the world is the game-changer, the world ups one’s optimism. As soon as I go out on the street and see the way people behave and the way light looks and the way things smell in the air, I suddenly feel closer to human nature and I feel more turned on.’
That fascination with people comes across in one of the perhaps underappreciated aspects of Joel’s early street photography: the sense of humour (or ‘yoo-mah’ in his still-strong Bronx accent). ‘What I recognised was that the world is crazy,’ he says. ‘People do the most ridiculous, unimaginable things and when you walk around with a camera, you have a licence to see, you’re witness to these absurdities. I found myself constantly entertained by human behaviour.’
In 1965 Meyerowitz also started carrying two cameras, one loaded with colour film and one with black & white, often taking pictures of the same subjects with both to allow direct comparisons later. He has since called the series The Colour Question, but in truth he already knew the answer to that particular conundrum: that colour offered a more elegant and complete way of describing the world. While the New Yorker has remained a passionate advocate for colour photography ever since, he would soon grow disillusioned with his initial approach to the medium.
‘Whenever you get good at something, it’s time to give it up and move along,’ he reasons. ‘I had already accomplished a few different bodies of work and I thought, you know, is that all there is to it? Am I going to continually make pictures that derived from the aesthetic of Henri Cartier-Bresson?’
In a bid to capture more than
simply a ‘decisive moment’, he decided to expand his focus to include all aspects of the street without hierarchy. ‘I needed to find a strategy that allowed me to see more of the depth of the street and instead of using a wider lens, I thought I had to step back,’ he explains. ‘By stepping back, the depth of field was increased, the kind of imagery that I made wasn’t as intimate as before, and I began to see more of the interactions and the mix of all of these elements: light, space, time, depth, colour, action, individuals. The rich broth of this made for me what I call a “field photograph”.’
This stepping back led to Joel swapping his trusty 35mm for an 8x10in view camera during family summer holidays on Cape Cod. His fascination with both small-town life in the middle-class resort and the simple play of light on architecture was captured in his first book, 1979’s Cape Light, which has since sold 100,000 copies. He also experimented with pushing the view camera further, shooting on 80 ASA film at f/90 with exposures lasting a minute or more, in order to capture saturated sunsets and atmospheric large-format landscapes. He refers to the resulting images as entre chien et loup - ‘between the dog and the wolf’ – a French expression for the oncoming twilight. If this relatively stately approach fulfilled his aim of breaking from his past (he has called them the ‘classical’ counterpart to the ‘jazz’ of his earlier work), he still had a desire to apply these new methods to his street photography.
His Empire State series duly borrowed a device from Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji. Just as the ukiyo-e printmaker showed glimpses of the mountain in scenes of everyday life in 1830s Japan, so Meyerowitz slipped the art deco skyscraper into the background of every shot. More recently, he has photographed meaningful objects in the studios of fine artists Paul Cézanne and Giorgio Morandi, continuing his dialogue with past masters.
Now he is keen to establish similar discourse with future generations too. Seeing Things, a 2016 photography book aimed at kids, was followed by the 34-module Masters of Photography online masterclass, the first in a series that now includes similar workshops with Steve McCurry, Albert Watson and David Yarrow. Joel describes his role as akin to a ‘tennis pro or a golf pro’, helping photographers to ‘up their game’. A new book based on the series, How I Make Photographs, continues his quest to demystify the medium further and help others to develop their own photographic identities.
‘You know, I’ve been photographing for almost 60 years and I’ve never lost my appetite for this crazy medium,’ he says proudly. ‘It’s just so enduring, it is always proposing a new way of looking at the world, at a particular quality of the world, at one’s own relationship to the world, at one’s acceptance of things. You have so much to learn about yourself and charting your own personal evolution is part of the joy of photography.’