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Joel Meyerowitz

Cape Light

Joel Meyerowitz

Joel Meyerowitz. Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1976

When I began working in large format in 1976, it was to resolve what had become a photographic problem for me - which at that time was provoked by John Szarkowski’s dictum - that "all a photograph does is describe what the photographer sees in front of him."

"I understood this as a challenge to expand upon and reconsider my ways for using color. Description being the key word.

I had begun shooting color in 1962 - my very first rolls in fact were Kodachrome - and had continually tried pressing the establishment into accepting it as a serious voice of the medium. But it wasn’t easy, and the art world in general had its own resistance to photography as an art form, and where color was seen as either commercial or amateurish. So, my leap into working in color with an 8x10 view camera, after 14 years of shooting with a 35mm, was primarily to add as much “description" as I possibly could in every frame I made.

Prior to this change of direction I was a working street photographer, out shooting every day. In fact, just before this change I had been awarded my 2nd Guggenheim grant to do what I felt was tough and necessary work on the new idea of middle-class Leisure Time in America, as seen in the context of the Vietnam War. This work used both color and B&W.  

In this Guggenheim work, I began to feel that my earlier point of view - as a photographer who still worked in and cared about the values of Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank - was a real limitation when it came to color. So I set out to challenge that point of view. I began to make what I then called ‘field photographs’, meaning that everything in front of the camera - "the field" - was of a new kind of visual importance to me, everything; and I wanted to try to make ‘non-hierarchical’ images, which led me to begin looking all over the frame. My idea was to make large-scale prints (which no one was doing in the mid 70s) and I felt that 35mm film - even though Kodachrome was a fantastically sharp film - was not the way for me to prove my point. So in a few steps I went from 35mm to 6x9cm, to 8x10, and there it was! The descriptive power of an 8x10 sheet of FILM! The ability to see things far away and still make them count as live matter in the image.

And so, I took myself off to Provincetown on Cape Cod so I could summer with my family, and learn how to see in 8x10, in which the image is upside down and reversed, while beginning to learn to use time in seconds, rather than in 1000th of a second. Well, Cape Cod is not 5th Avenue, but the light out there on that 60-mile-long sandbar in the Atlantic is unlike light on the mainland. Every molecule of moisture refracts light like a prism; while on the mainland there is a particle of dirt in every drop of atmosphere. Once I recognized that, then everything changed. Light, in all its intensity and tone, became my subject. Just as in 35mm, you can only photograph where you are and what you see there.

-- Joel Meyerowitz

Selected Works

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Joel Meyerowitz

Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1976

4 ETH

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On SuperRare

Joel Meyerowitz

Ariel, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1983

5 ETH

Joel Meyerowitz

Truro, Massachusetts,1977, 1977

5 ETH

Joel Meyerowitz

Porch, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1977

5 ETH

Joel Meyerowitz

Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1980

5 ETH

Joel Meyerowitz

The Cottages, Truro, Massachusetts, 1982

5 ETH

Full Collection

The 137 Reserve Club is an invite-only group of collectors with first access to work from the world’s most iconic photographers. Sign Up to access the full inventory from this collection.

Artist

Joel Meyerowitz

1938 (USA)

After studying painting, art history, and medical illustration at Ohio State University, he worked as an art director in advertising in the early 60’s. In 1962, Robert Frank made photographs for a booklet Meyerowitz designed, and it was while watching Frank work that he discovered that photographs could be made while both the photographer and the subject were in motion! The power of this observation made Meyerowitz quit his job immediately, borrow a camera, and go out onto the streets of New York. He has been on the streets ever since.

Meyerowitz began by using color film in 1962, not knowing that photographers of that era believed that black and white was the ‘art’ of photography. During his first days on the street, he met a young graphic designer, Tony Ray-Jones, who, like Meyerowitz, began using color as the most natural means of making photographs. Later that year Meyerowitz met, and became friends with Garry Winogrand, and together they walked and worked Fifth Avenue daily for nearly five years. Although Meyerowitz is a street photographer in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, he transformed the medium with his pioneering use of color. As an early advocate, he became instrumental in changing the attitude toward color photography from one of resistance to nearly universal acceptance. His first book Cape Light (1978) is considered a classic work of color photography and has sold over 200,000 copies. Meyerowitz has published 42 books to date.

While Meyerowitz never felt constrained by any one discipline of photography, he says, “street photography was the only form of the medium that owed nothing to painting nor to the other plastic arts. It is purely photographic.” He feels that such a starting point naturally opens one to question the world around them, and questions are what lead us to make new kinds of photographs. This restless energy and open approach to subject matter has produced such varied work as; Photographs From a Moving Car (a one person show at MoMA in 1968), his Guggenheim Fellowship project, Still Going: America During Vietnam, his work with the large format, 8×10 view camera which resulted in such diverse books as; Cape Light (1978), St. Louis and The Arch (1980), A Summer’s Day (1985), Redheads (1991), Bay/Sky (1993), Aftermath: The World Trade Center Archive (2006), and others. These bodies of work deal with diverse subjects such as; light, portraits, landscape, cities, and history, and all clearly diverge from street photography, yet Meyerowitz’s eye and ideas remain consistent throughout.

In 1995, Meyerowitz produced and directed his first film, Pop. It came into being as spontaneously as a street photograph when Meyerowitz heard his father say, “the trouble with me is, I never get to the point where I get to the point!” In an instant he recognized that his father was lost and asking for help. The result is an intimate diary of a three-week road trip he made with his son, Sasha, and his father, Hy. This odyssey’s central character is an unpredictable, streetwise and witty 87- year-old with Alzheimer’s. It is both an open-eyed look at aging and a meditation on the significance of memory.

During sixty years of making photographs, Meyerowitz has consistently turned toward greater simplification. The Elements, an ongoing body of work begun in 2007, is an examination of the four phenomena that govern our lives and a search for a new way of describing their power. His works, still lives, are a departure from everything he has done before. He uses found objects; cast offs, which he places in a makeshift, theater-like space, ‘Teatrino’ he calls it, and finds himself giving them a second life. His interest in still lives developed into two projects photographing objects from the studios of Paul Cézanne and Giorgio Morandi.

Meyerowitz is a recipient of both the NEA and NEH awards. He was the only photographer to gain unrestricted access to Ground Zero after 9/11, which produced a body of work that led Meyerowitz to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale for Architecture in 2002. His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, Tate Modern, The Victoria & Albert Museum, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk Museum and others worldwide. Meyerowitz lives and works in London and New York.

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