Joel Meyerowitz – Robert Frank led Meyerowitz to photography
Joel Meyerowitz was born in New York on 6 March 1938, where he grew up on the streets of the Bronx, an environment that probably had a lasting effect on his later interest in street scenes. He studied art, art history and medical illustration at Ohio State University. His original career path took him to an advertising agency where he worked in a managerial capacity, and where he came into contact with the Swiss-born American photo artist Robert Frank in 1962. Franks’s work impressed Meyerowitz so much, that he resigned from his job and aspired to a career as photographer. With his 35-mm camera, he roamed the streets of New York’s metropolis of millions at the same time as big names such as Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Tod Papageorge, Tony Ray-Jones and Gary Winogrand, and made black and white photographs of whatever seemed noteworthy to him. His most important inspirations alongside Robert Frank were Henri Cartier-Bresosn and Eugène Atget. His debut as a genre photographer was quickly met with acclaim and Joel Meyerowitz knew that he was on the right track.
Courageous and consistent: The step to colour photography
Joel Meyerowitz experimented for a while with alternating between black-and-white and colour photography before finally choosing in the 1960s to photograph in colour. He was one of the first serious artists to take this step – before that, colour photography had been frowned upon as an advertising means, whilst high art was held to monochrome representation. Meyerowitz did not make this decision lightly, but executed this orientation carefully: For him, colour photography offered more opportunities to explore and depict previously invisible nuances. He caused particular commotion with a series of pictures he took from a moving car. The project From a moving car earned him his first solo exhibition at the renowned Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968.
Art and artists mature over time
Joel Meyerowitz freely admits that his attitude to photography as art changed over the years. As a young artist, he said, he was more dogmatic, more missionary, a painter with the camera who was determined to form and represent his own visual language. His work Ground Zero, In particular, changed him in this regard, the artist explained; at that moment he simply wanted to capture history and not create a consciously composed work of art. Regardless of this self-assessment, his pictures in the series Aftermath, in which Meyerowitz documents the extent of destruction, possess a high degree of artistic maturity. Meyerowitz has a positive view of the development of digital photography. For him as a photographer, it means more control, and above all, the removal of the often-agonizing waiting times for the development of a print. A remarkable statement, considering that at the beginning of his career, Meyerowitz deliberately relied on long exposures as an artistic styling device. These early pictures gave rise to his first book, Cape Light, which was hailed as a milestone of photography.
Joel Meyerowitz is responsible today for the image archive of the destroyed World Trade Center.
Joel Meyerowitz - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
