Joel Meyerowitz, New York City, 1975
11 rooms in Artist and Society
This display explores Meyerowitz’s innovations in colour photography as he records the streets and landscapes of New York City and beyond
It’s as if the symphony of the street is truly engaged in the mind of someone who is photographing in colour.
Joel Meyerowitz
Inspired by the Swiss photographer Robert Frank, Joel Meyerowitz quit his job at an advertising agency in 1962 and started making photographs in the streets of New York City. Most photographers shot in black and white, but Meyerowitz chose to use colour film. He was one of the first artists to do so, which later led to the acceptance of colour photography as an art medium.
In the tradition of the ‘flâneur’ (a street observer who wanders without a specific purpose), Meyerowitz photographed the world around him with a borrowed 35mm camera. Later he also began to shoot in black and white, which could more easily be processed into prints. Colour slides had to be projected onto the wall. He says: ‘when you have prints in your hands you can study the relationships between them.’ But his view remained that ‘colour plays itself out along a richer band of feelings – more wavelengths, more radiance, more sensation’. In A Question of Color, Meyerowitz pairs black-and-white and colour prints of nearly the same scene to demonstrate this point.
Finding limitations when capturing details with 35mm colour film, in 1976 Meyerowitz began to use a large format Deardorff view camera. Working in this new way, he combined the spontaneity of street photography with a slower, more meditative approach. He says it was like ‘moving from jazz to classical music’. Displayed here are his images of the luminous light of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and the devastated site of Ground Zero, New York.
In his 60 years of photography, Meyerowitz has constantly reinvented many aspects of the medium, while always staying true to the humanism of his vision.
Art in this room
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Joel Meyerowitz
Bay/Sky, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1985
1985
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Joel Meyerowitz
New York City, 1975
1975
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Joel Meyerowitz
New York City, 1974
1974
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Joel Meyerowitz
New York City, 1975
1975
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Joel Meyerowitz
New York City, 1978
1978
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Joel Meyerowitz
An NYPD rescue worker, New York City, 2001
2001
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