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.

OCTOBER 30, 2015

Once-In-A-Lifetime

Dear Friends,

I have just returned to New York City for a 3 week or so, intensive period of work. I must sign 30,000+ prints for the upcoming sale of my archive. A life’s work is on the line, and so my studio director has signed up a team of assistants to work with me for 6 days a week, 8-10 hour days, in order to complete the sale by a certain date.

Just today I signed 1550 prints, so I can see the path through this as an endurance test, but one I happily commit to. What this means in terms of the blog postings is that I will most likely not have the concentration to write during this period. But by this time you have read me regularly, and you get the drift of my thinking, although I hope I have not been too repetitive, still my concerns and my limits have been out there for all to see.

I propose doing the simplest thing to keep the blog going until I can be fully present once again. That would be to post a picture a day as is my blog’s raison d’être, but without my making commentary. However; now that you have read my kind of responses to seeing and working, I am open to seeing what it is that any of you might contribute to the images I show, your take on them for example. No obligation, believe me, just my own curiosity to see what ways, if any, I may have provoked you into thinking about this crazy, wonderful medium of ours.

You’ll be hearing from me again when this is done. Wish me luck on this Once-in-a-Lifetime deal.

10-30 Christ L1002342

OCTOBER 29, 2015

Graphic Design

Chairs are sitting everywhere. And as I wrote earlier this month, I have been collecting them in a steady but casual way for many years, slowly watching them build a presence in my archive. I have no doubt that one day I’ll find the time to take a hard look at the collection to see if it is worth publishing as a book.

What I like about this particular body of work is that I’m not out hunting for them to become a set of photographs. The work grows on its own like a kind of ‘folk art’ collection of oddities that accumulates its strength from the variety of the objects in it.

What pleases me in this photograph, besides the contrast between the two value systems within the frame (the place and the chairs) is the amazing object the chairs make when seen stacked that way. The chair’s simple form becomes a rich and beautifully graphic result as a single design motif, in a way it is just like all the wooden beading everywhere in the paneling. It accumulates by simple addition until we take in the wonder of it. That coat rack ain’t so bad either.

10-29 Chairs L1002327

OCTOBER 28, 2015

Facade

The Duomo in Milan is one of the largest churches in the world, and like so many cathedrals of this scale it took a long time to be completed, close to 800 years. The sculptures on the facade came last, probably sometime in the early 1800’s.

When I was there I saw an amazing pair of figures, which although I have seen the building before I had never noticed the detail in the drapery covering – or not – the figure on the right. It is an astonishing image for the front of a church.

10-28 statue L1002259

OCTOBER 27, 2015

A Full House

Giving a talk about photography is always a new adventure, no matter how many times i have done it, because I never know what I’ll be talking about until I am up there in front of the audience. I like that risk because it is just like making photographs; the unexpected can happen at any moment.

It may be a new thought triggered by a slide that I have seen many times before but now strikes me in a fresh way, or else it might be a question from someone that sends me off in a direction I hadn’t considered before, or finally it might be the challenge of the new work I am making which might push me to reconsider the older works coming onto the screen.

We can never imagine the work we might make in the future – that’s part of the wonder of all art making – but when we are in the present and can look back, as I can, over 50 years of work, there seems to be a continuous path that unwinds in a way that sometimes seems inevitable.

10-26 crowd L1002212

OCTOBER 26, 2015

1000th

I had to go to Milan for a show and talk. On the way the landscape whizzing by always has moments of surprising imagery. The 1000th of a second I shoot at in these situations still can’t always freeze what’s nearest to the camera, but things further away are not moving as fast so they are precisely defined.

I love the fragmentary quality of this kind of seeing and responding. It makes me extremely watchful for periods during every train trip I go on, because we never know what we might find interesting.

This new forest along the right of way was flickering by with light and shadows, and then I saw the opening with the scratchy lines in it, and the single white line in the distance. At 140 miles an hour there is barely time to register the event and make a shot. But I’ve learned to be in tune with this kind of seeing. That single white tree or pole, or whatever it was, seemed so beautiful to me!

10-26 train L1002192Then, as the train pulled into the outer edges of Milan, structures, and the materiality of the outer edge of cities, begin to replace the simplicity of the countryside, and it always makes me realize how harsh an environment we all make, and then accept as a way of living.

This ‘way in’ to cities is evident all over the world now. A brutal form of ugliness in the architecture, and over it are scrawled the painted shouts of the minorities and immigrants who are pushed out there by the societies that accept them for their brute labor, but basically keep them penned up in these enclaves of sadness.

The politicians – everywhere –  just don’t understand what should be done to make happy citizens, and yet it is right there in front of them.

10-26 city L1002208