Author Archives: joelmeyerowitz2014

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About joelmeyerowitz2014

STUDIO BIO: Joel Meyerowitz is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. He was born in New York in 1938 and began photographing in 1962. Meyerowitz is a “street photographer” in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, although he works exclusively in color. As an early advocate of color photography (early-60’s) he was instrumental in changing the attitude toward color photography from one of resistance to nearly universal acceptance. His first book “Cape Light” is considered a classic work of color photography and has sold over 100,000 copies during its 26-year life. He has published nineteen other books including “Bystander: The History of Street Photography” and “Provence: Lasting Impressions.” In 1998 Meyerowitz produced and directed his first film, ”POP”, an intimate diary of a three-week road trip he made with his son Sasha and his father, Hy. This odyssey has as its central character an unpredictable, street wise 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. Within a few days of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, Meyerowitz began to create an archive of the destruction and recovery at Ground Zero. He was the only photographer who was granted unimpeded access to the site. Meyerowitz took a meditative stance toward the work and workers there, systematically documenting the painful work of rescue, recovery, demolition and excavation. The World Trade Center Archive includes more than 8,000 images and will be available for research, exhibition, and publication at museums in New York and Washington, DC. In 2001 The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. State Department asked the Museum of the City of New York and Meyerowitz to create a special exhibition of images from the archive to send around the world. The images traveled to more than 200 cities in 60 countries and over three and a half million people viewed the exhibition. In addition to the traveling shows, Meyerowitz was invited to represent the United States at the 8th Venice Biennale for Architecture with his photographs from the World Trade Center Archives. In September 2002, he exhibited 73 images – some as large as 22 feet – in lower Manhattan. Some recent books are: “Taking My Time”, his fifty year, two volume, retrospective book by Phaidon Press of London, “Provence: lasting Impressions,” co-authored with his wife Maggie Barrett, a book on the late work of Paul Strand by Aperture, "Glimpse": Photographs From Moving Car, which was a solo show at MoMA, and "Joel Meyerowitz Retrospective", published in conjunction with his recent show at NRW Forum in Dusseldorf. Meyerowitz is a Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of both the NEA and NEH awards. His work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and many others.

SEPTEMBER 4, 2015

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Symmetry

At a roadside rest stop I saw this cop walking over to make an inquiry of the driver of the Michelin truck and was amused momentarily by the symmetry of the scene; the colors of their uniforms, the dual cellphones, the pair of comic book images. It was just a moment in passing, but something about it was potentially interesting.

Meanwhile a friend has been involved with a project that involves crude, hand made Michelin men figures, photographed in an African nation where Michelin doesn’t support their distributors with any kind of advertising iconography, so the garage guys make their own. This work is currently on its way into a book. Here’s a peek at a few wild images of Michelin men.

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SEPTEMBER 3, 2015

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Pleasure in Contemplation

While I was working with these objects I picked up an old funnel that I used a year before and found inside the funnel another small clump of ‘smoke bush’ fluff which had settled into the form of the cone shape of the funnel. The color and shape seemed to relate to the conical tops of the tin objects so I put it on top of the round form just to see what would happen.

Still life seems to me to be a form of play in which the objects have a life of their own, and as I move them around the stage something comes from them, a presence, a spirit, even sometimes a sense of their potential force. I add and subtract and then sit and look, waiting for something to speak to me or suggest another move. In that sense they are always open to subtle changes as I become familiar with their character and how it projects into the space.

This is still new to me and I am finding a kind of pleasure in contemplation that I hadn’t known came with the territory of the still life.

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SEPTEMBER 2, 2015

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Talisman

Most of this still life work has been made in the dark or near dark of my studio, but when I saw a slice of light falling through a crack in the covered skylight – a change in the season allowed the sun to be there for 5 minutes – striking this talismanic figure ,I sensed that I should spend some time seeing where it would take me. It was only then that I saw the marking on the box behind the figure, which for some reason seemed to read as a falling figure, the kind one would see in a painting by Bosch, and then of course I couldn’t look at the box without seeing it that way.

How often does that happen? Something is right there but it remains invisible until the right combination of elements makes it visible, and then a fresh start is possible.

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SEPTEMBER 1, 2015

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Being Taken In

I found myself neglecting to show some of the still lives I had been making at the same time as I was making outside images. This strange collection of forms below had been up in the teatrino for days, moving themselves around into different groupings. The organic shape (a smoke bush’s flowers which had dried and became this aggregate mass of delicate twiggy forms) and for some reason seemed to want to appear with the grey shapes I was working with then. These connections come so suddenly, on instinct, that I tend not to resist and just let myself be taken in by them to see what comes of it.

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AUGUST 31, 2015

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Life is Sweet

This was a day of generosity. In a nearby small town I came across this beautiful bunting wrapped, church doorway. No doubt ready for a procession for a saint’s day, or a wedding, or who knows what festive event the town was making, but it made me happy just looking at the way the space was redefined by some simple fabric hanging on the facade.

Then, returning home, a bounty of offerings appeared; Silvia came by with a cake she just baked, then her mother-in-law stopped by with some fresh ricotta she had made from the new sheep they recently bought, then a man from Buonconvento, on the way to his sister’s place, stopped by to bring us a box of figs from his amazingly productive tree. All that, and some eggplants from the garden, which I roasted and turned into baba ganouj became a summer dinner. And a still life, and a portrait of a building. You work with what you have.

Life is sweet!

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AUGUST 30, 2015

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Visuals

Perhaps we are all programmed with visuals that we have collected over our lives. For example; this woman carrying a doll at her breast – probably her 3 year old is walking up ahead with daddy – but she, in that moment, for that split second, seemed to be nursing an infant, or holding it madonna-like, especially since I was in Italy where those paintings are innumerable.

In any event I responded on instinct and reached for it to see what it would look like later on.

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AUGUST, 28, 2015

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Dreamland

I went to visit with my friend, the photographer Paolo Ventura, in his studio on the far side of Tuscany. At some point he took a seat on his own hand painted set where he usually has characters from the 40’s and 50’s playing out his stories and dreams. In fact he usually plays some of the characters. But here he was just himself, and to me he looked like he belonged there in that barren, spindly, woodland, almost like a lost traveller in a dreamscape, or a contemporary version of the sage sitting alongside the road, which one finds in those School of Siena paintings of the 1500’s. Slightly wild-eyed or mad, or possessed, which he is.

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AUGUST 27, 2015

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Wolves in Tuscany?

Yes! We had heard bleating and strange noises coming from the sheep pen up the road. Unusual for middle of the day when the sheep are often lying about or huddled under a tree in the shade. Maggie went up the hill to see what was the matter. A wolf had gotten into the fenced in enclosure and killed two pregnant mothers. I raced up to the pen to see for myself.

There are no words that can make it become something other than what it is. And a photograph is simpler still; no tricks of the light, no angle that dramatizes it to make it more horrific or sad, just the plain fact of what a slaughtered animal looks like in the moment after its death. Sometimes just bearing witness is enough.

I never was one to photograph wars, or the depths of poverty, because I couldn’t stand the idea of making esthetic decisions about framing when dealing with such enormous human events. It was different when I went into Ground Zero for 9 months, that was all Aftermath, and as such it needed the record to be made for posterity, but to witness slaughter and disease and human wreckage and while doing it make something beautifully framed seems beyond my capacity.

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AUGUST 26, 2015

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Practical? Art?

In our time Earth Art and Process Art have become important formal ways of looking at things, but when I see something practical, like this pine tree being held up by two poles a local farmer used to support the tree, I think – this is real art,not just that it looks like art, in that it can be seen as beautiful, and it has a real function. Of course it becomes even more beautiful with the red shutters and lovely light and shadow, and the shape of the house, and the feel of the day, and finally, that sweep of the pine tree into the heavens.

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