Joel Meyerowitz, in “Everybody Street”

(soft music)

I wander the streets not knowing what I was shooting.

I just knew I had to be out there watching life

because I was interested in the way people did things.

It seems to me that's what you photograph

the instantaneous gesture when somebody made

some kind of a motion or did something physical.

So Robert Frank shot this job for me in Stuyvesant Town

and it was so interesting.

I had never seen a real photographer work.

I'd seen fashion photographers, but

never a real photographer.

He just was so physical and he moved so agilely and

he was balletic and he kind of whispered to the girls

as he was photographing them.

I just saw something I had never seen before

which is you can move and take photographs at the same time!

You don't have to say hold that pose, lift your head,

turn the . . .

I mean, he just moved with them.

And I left that shoot two hours later and

went out on the street and suddenly everything on the street

was alive to me.

Someone waving for a taxi.

Two people hugging goodbye.

A mother pulling a kid across the street.

I saw this thing click, click, click in my mind.

And by the time I got back to my office

which was on 53rd and 5th Avenue

I knew I had to leave.

I walked into my office, the art director said

How'd the shoot go?

And I said it was great.

I'm quitting.

He said why?

What are you gonna do?

And I said I want to be a photographer.

And I remember he asked me the crucial question.

He said do you have a camera?

I said no, I don't have a camera.

He said how are you gonna make pictures

if you don't have a camera?

He opens his drawer and he handed me his camera, a Pentax.

He said here, use this until you get a camera.

So that for me was the beginning

and it was on pure impulse that somebody transformed

everyday life into an art form.

A physical, visual art form.

I think that's part of what you love when you're a street

photographer is this kind of sensibility that develops

where you think you understand something about not only

the person you're photographing or the group you're

photographing but the culture at large becomes aware.

It enters your awareness or it enters your sensitivity.

Some sense of exchange that only I can identify with

them in this way because I'm me.

And in a sense they help in an aggregate way

make you the artist more of yourself.

I think that's what all photographers love about the

medium is that something happens

some personal thing happens.

Even though it's a machine and even though it uses

a fraction of a second of time we learn as human beings

how to understand those minute little exchanges.

♫ I wonder why that is

♫ The paper boy don't come no more