5 Things Joel Meyerowitz Taught Us About Photography
Career photographer Joel Meyerowitz, who started in the early 60s, is known for the diverse breadth of his work and for playing a key role in legitimizing color photography as fine art. Inspired by the work of his contemporary Robert Frank, in the early 60s Joel quit his job as an advertising art director and committed himself full-time to making work on the streets of New York City. Here are 5 lessons to learn from someone considered both a pioneer and a master of photography.
Get Close, Act Fast
The work Joel made on the streets of New York City alongside people like Gary Winogrand, came to define a way of picture-making that is replicated to this day. What camera did Joel Meyerowitz use? Strapped with a Leica M2, a 35mm or 28mm lens to match, and often the now discontinued Kodachrome, Joel branded the streets of NYC as a place of life and 5th Avenue as its hub. This location is still crawled by street photographers every day yearning to capture the pulse of a street whose multi-faceted subjects continuously supplant themselves. One thing that either repels or draws photographers into the world of street photography is this engagement of the everyday subject. Many photographers feel like they are violating some unspoken rule or ethical code of personal space by including strangers in the frame. Joel, both in his work and explicitly, says get right up there, that’s where the magic is happening. He makes it clear that the street is a communal space to engage in without fear, and that the best pictures come from the freedom and synchronicity that fearlessness allows. It’s easy to spot a photo where the maker is scared of this closeness and has created some invisible boundary between them and their subject. Joel was and continues to be one of the key people to break down that construct and to encourage all photographers to act with confidence and no trepidation.
New York City, 1974 © Joel Meyerowitz
Change Your M.O.
One of Joel’s most famous works is a project known as Cape Light, pictures mostly composed of contemplative blue light landscapes in Massachusetts’s Cape Cod. Joel carried around a wooden 8x10 Deardorff camera trading the skittery avenues of New York for the quiet intimacy of this beach town. This successful 180 departure from his old work means several things. One is that the foreign can be close to home. Creating a different kind of work doesn’t require moving around the world, radical change can happen in spaces as close as one’s backyard. This project provides an important lesson in artistic limitations that are often self-imposed. In photography it’s easy to have a narrative of “I shoot this way, I take these kinds of photos, therefore I am this kind of photographer.” This binary way of thinking doesn’t allow for new visions and patterns to emerge in one’s work. The final lesson, probably the one most tangible today is that there is beauty in the banal. To turn something that is considered an inconsequential, average, part of life into a beautiful image, as Joel Meyerowitz did, is to make the invisible visible and mark the every day as important. Joel’s photos of old cars, diners, lighthouses, telephone booths, and beach scapes are still influences on popular work made contemporarily.
Photographers as Authors
Joel has a philosophy on photographers that posits them as the true authors of their images. The photographer chooses what is in the frame: what is shown, what is not, who is positioned in what way, and what two unrelated things are pictorially brought together to create new meaning. In this way, the photographer is not merely a vessel for objective documentation, but a builder of a world contained inside the frame. The photographer chooses what is of value and guides the viewer into that importance. This insight is extremely validating in a continuous conversation around the importance of photography. This distinctly separates the role of the image maker from that of the camera. Moving into an increasingly automated society where tech replacement is a legitimate fear there is a lot of solace to be found in this sentiment. A camera is merely a tool, a photographer does not press a button and pure reality is captured. Instead, the individual constructs and manipulates the world around them; the image is built. The photos let the viewer envision the way the photographer imagines their own world.
New York City, 1963 © Joel Meyerowitz
The Impact of One Person
In the aftermath of 9/11, Joel felt it was his duty as a citizen to help in any way he could. After attempting to gain ground on his own and long appeals to former mayor Rudy Giuliani with no luck, he found his inroad becoming the archivist for the cleanup of this disastrous event. Joel became one of the only photographers with unimpeded access to Ground Zero. Meyerowitz made over 5,000 images that remain in permanence at the Museum of the City of New York. He went in without a plan or backing, only a calling that it was his duty as a citizen to help. He is the reason that one of the most disastrous events in U.S. history remained heavily documented. Artists often seek out the authority to create a project or wait for some objective validation that their work is good enough to represent an event or group of people. Often that permission never comes. Joel’s work on Aftermath serves as an essential reminder that the internal guide can be the best resource for creating meaningful and long-lasting photos.
Working with Joy
One thing impossible to ignore about Joel Meyerowitz is his way of engaging with the world around him. His inflection and endless tone of interest gives him the air of someone who just discovered a secret and has to share it with anyone who will listen. He always talks of the endless possibilities photography has to offer and positions himself and his career as an accessible achievement, not an anomaly. All pretension and ego is removed in the way he comes across, and this kind of rampant optimism is contagious. Embarking on a lifelong artistic journey has eternally been tied with constant suffering as an inevitability. Although Joel’s work was hard-earned and extremely laborious, there’s an overwhelming sense that he accomplished all of it with passion and joy.
Maggie and Joel, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1990 © Joel Meyerowitz
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