Before 1970, color photography was snubbed by the medium’s greats. “There are four simple words which must be whispered,” Walter Evans wrote in an essay, “color photography is vulgar.” Robert Frank declared, “Black and white are the colors of photography.” Color was expensive to print, difficult to use, and appeared garish. After the first Kodachrome was released, in 1938, it was relegated to lowly advertising campaigns.
In 1962, Joel Meyerowitz was working at an advertising agency when he met Frank on a collaborative project. The latter’s fluid and poetic black-and-white shots struck him. Despite having no formal training, and not even owning a camera, he quit the firm. “I’m going to be a photographer,” Meyerowitz told his boss. He bought a 35-mm. camera and took to the streets, catching magic. Perhaps it was his background in advertising, but by 1976 the New York photographer had turned almost exclusively to color, which he mastered alongside the English photographer Tony Ray-Jones, who was studying with Alexey Brodovitch in Manhattan.
After Ray-Jones moved back to Europe in 1965, Meyerowitz hung out with Garry Winogrand. Many of his peers, such as Saul Leiter, made the switch to fashion photography. “When fashion came along, it stole them,” he says, “and they started to like it. They liked being with the women, and making the money, and having their pictures in the magazines.” Meyerowitz, however, was a purist and began experimenting with images of architecture.
Commercial success wasn’t far off. In 1976, John Szarkowski, the Museum of Modern Art’s photography director, organized a show on the little-known color pioneer William Eggleston. The seed was sown. In 1978, Meyerowitz’s book Cape Light would make waves. Over the following decades, he traveled to more than 60 countries and 200 cities.
In The Pleasure of Seeing: Conversations with Joel Meyerowitz on Sixty Years in the Life of Photography, the 85-year-old photographer sits down with the Italian historian Lorenzo Braca to recount his history. Compelling memories, such as the time Henri Cartier-Bresson called him up to express his admiration, or from his travels through Andalusia, or of the dark moments around 9/11, are nestled among the stories collected in these pages. The headline of a 2018 New York Times article gets it just right: Joel Meyerowitz’s Career Is a Mini History of Photography. —Elena Clavarino
The Pleasure of Seeing: Conversations with Joel Meyerowitz on Sixty Years in the Life of Photography is out now from Damiani
Elena Clavarino is the Senior Editor at AIR MAIL