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.

MAY 12, 2015

Inside The Light

My eye is dazzled regularly by the Tuscan light.  A light that caused us many years ago to name our book on the region; “Tuscany: Inside The Light,” because it so often seemed as if the light was emanating from within the landscape rather than falling on it.

There is something very special in the composition of the soil here which I believe contributes to this light effect, and my reading of it this way. The earth here is not the typical dark earth of many agricultural zones. This earth is known as the Tuscan crete, which is a light toned, clay-like material deposited millions of years ago as sea bottom, and as such it is incredibly nutrient rich, but not dark. I believe that this light toned earth forms a base below the grasses, grains, sunflowers, vineyards, etc, that are part of the landscape here.

This produces a more reflective surface than a dark soil does, and so there is a luminous lift to the light bouncing back from the land, which I believe is what generates the special qualities of Tuscan light. Certainly daily atmospheric conditions emphasize light and color as well, but from my 20 year point of view working here, it is the accumulated resonance of this scattering of the light that accounts for these remarkable and emotional displays.

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MAY 11, 2015

Expect Nothing

Remember that line from the old Amex ads; “never leave home without it?” Well you know what I would say, never even go to the bathroom in a restaurant without a camera on your shoulder. On my way upstairs to find the restroom in this Bolognese, countryside restaurant, I was surprised, when turning the corner in what was an unused salon, to be greeted by this assortment of objects. What’s a little Charlie Chaplin doing next to the strange, oversized head, and why the helmet on the table, and the toy car on the left, all of it, etc?

And when I turned around the rest of the space was almost as surreal as the head. Who knows what it all adds up to? Not much really. But the truth is that there is always something to see, even where you least expect it, and it is better to be prepared; as the old Zen warrior motto states, ‘expect nothing, be prepared for anything.’

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MAY 10, 2015

Small Touches

I have often thought that habitual, ordinary gestures, create the encyclopedia of forms that define our states of mind, expressions, attitudes, etc. And from the subtle differences in the way each actor performs them we have unlimited opportunities to see them again and again, in ways that add freshness, maybe even originality, to the interpretation.

Here, at 60 miles an hour, the relaxed hand of the driver could have been in the same pose were he sitting at home on his couch watching the football game. However, as I passed him (my wife was driving) I noticed that in the overall grayness of the day, and the monochrome of the cab and its paint job, the fleshiness of his hand became the live element of the frame within the frame within the frame.

Small touches, almost nothings, can often be the telling moment that makes me alert to seeing, even while being in a moving car at 60 milers an hour.

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MAY 9, 2015

The Jewel

How lucky I was to be out early that day because the world was completely suffused in morning fog. Everything was a blur in the mist and magical to see, or try and see. After about an hour of walking and shooting this gauzy world the sun burned though and lifted some of the ground fog, and for a moment, really, just a moment and then – whoosh –  the world was lit.

But that moment between the two was a delicacy that lifted my entire being.  What a world we are in, what a magical, remarkable, unexpected jewel of a world!

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MAY 8, 2015

What We Know

The stairs up to the studio were almost always in a shadowed space, but in the spring of the year, for only a few weeks at most, a lozenge of light, or some days a tentacle, or a band, or fan, or spray, depending on the cloud cover or angle, slides down the wall and describes a new space in what is a familiar but often overlooked passage.

It points out how we can still be surprised by what we think we know.

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MAY 7, 2015

What Catches the Eye

Who knows why any one stops any time, anywhere? Why this trough, which is probably a truck tire track, filled with rain water in a gravel-bedded parking area. But there it is, the puzzle that all photographers deal with all the time. Something catches the eye, with no rational reason for it. Maybe it was the color of the light as the day waned, which, when seen against the new green of the hills at that hour set off the slightly warmer feel of the gravel, or perhaps it was the piece of sky that made its poem in the trough, falling to earth in a way that made me pause. These are the mysteries of this remarkable medium that so many of us are in dialogue with, and that makes it is so compelling.

So the dialogue continues.

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MAY 6, 2015

Simple things

A late evening walk after a soft rain. Gianni accompanied us so we could all catch up with the events of the season we had spent in France. Suddenly he leaped over the edge to grab some flowers. His spirit, and the joy he takes in everything, reminded me of why we love Tuscany so much.

It’s not only nature that calls to us, but a friendship with a man of this land whose connection  to it is so natural and deep that it has added a respect for all things Tuscan to our way of thinking. And out of that has come a kind of image making that is open and relaxed and about daily pleasure. And so portraits and gestures, and landscapes, and still lives, and the simplest of daily comings and goings mark my days. Everything seems photographable.

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MAY 5, 2015

Contadini

In Tuscany we live on a working farm, and now (2015) we have been here for a whole year, but back when this ‘every day for a year’ series was begun we were there for only 6 months. We became part of the small community formed by Silvia and Vincenzo, a mid 40’s couple who work the land in the old spirit of the contadini’s of the era of padrones, when the system was not too far removed from the serfdom of the middle ages. There are a few other people right nearby who form this little enclave of about a dozen of us, of which we are the stranieri, outsiders.

Silvia was making pizza in their wood fired outdoor oven, a relic of the 18th century when their house was built.To see them work the oven and how easily they move as a team, including their 10 year old son Giuseppe, who ladled the sauces on each pizza, was a gift, as was the pleasure of devouring the pizzas afterward. All the sauces and meats and cheese came from their farm, and I cannot tell you how sweet and true the flavors were.

This image is merely a description of one step of the process. The cows below sometimes make their way into the pizza too.

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MAY 4, 2015

Beauty and the Beast

I had gone into town to meet someone, and on the way in I was stunned once again by the simple beauty visible almost anywhere in this remarkable valley. A roadside with an old olive tree and a new field of poppies, and in the distance a line of cypresses. Like a haiku poem unfolding in 3 lines and 2 frames.

05-4 L pano1028585In town, the fable of the ‘beauty and the beast,’ played itself out in 2 strokes. As I walked to my meeting with the ‘beauty,’ I saw the old man below plodding heavily along, andI  felt the pull of gravity on his whole being. Not that he is the beast but the space around him was weighted with his effort, and some ineffable sadness. The beast I saw was one who worked hard all his life and, ilke many country people here, are bent from a lifetime of labor.

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MAY 3, 2015

Retreat in the Woods

We have had a friend, Gianni, for 20 years in Tuscany, and as soon as we arrived and settled in he took us off to his cabin that he built in the woods, where he reads and writes, brings his treasures, and hangs out when things get too hectic. It’s a real retreat.

If photographs could convey the ‘smell’ of a place, and sometimes we can almost sense it from the mood of the image, this place would be rich with the scent of old wood, leathers, canvas,  wool and linen, antlers, boots and their polish, saddles, oil-skinned cottons, all sun warmed and carrying the aroma of the deep green and fragrant, springtime woods. What a place!

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