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TO SEE A GALLERY OF JOEL MEYEROWITZ' IMAGES, CLICK HERE

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All Images © Joel Meyerowitz, Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

The South Tower, Ground Zero, 2001

Joel Meyerowitz calls himself predominately a “street photographer,” with a body of work that has appeared in over 350 exhibitions and in 15 books—most notably, Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive, the only photographic record of Ground Zero after the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11. He persisted in doing this 9-month photography project, even though the site was officially closed to photographers. The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. State Department worked with the Museum of the City of New York and Meyerowitz to create a special exhibition of these images, which has traveled around the world since 2002.

I spoke with Joel Meyerowitz when he learned that Harry Gordon, who he describes as “the art director that changed my life,” had just died in Spain. Meyerowitz himself started his career as an art director at a small advertising agency in New York back in the early 1960s. “When I worked for Gordon, he told me to go downtown and watch this photographer do a shoot for a project on which I was a junior art director,” he says. The photographer was Robert Frank, and although it was a commercial shoot, recalls Meyerowitz, “he handled himself and the subject in the most amazing way. It so changed my mind and opened my eyes.” Afterwards, he headed back to the office, “but all I could see on the streets of New York was the world as it might have been seen through this guy’s eyes,” he recalls. By the time he got back to the office, he was so affected by his experience on the street that he promptly quit his job. “I said to Harry, ‘I have to leave. I’m going to be a photographer.’ He asked whether I had a camera, and I said no, and he said, ‘Here, borrow mine.’” With that camera, says Meyerowitz, “I went out onto the streets of New York and began my life. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to that man.”

Looking back on this pivotal experience, he says, “It’s one of those changing moments when you realize that you’re in the grip of destiny. I didn’t know anything about photography before that.” He was very impressed with the way that Robert Frank made images while both he and his subjects were moving. “You didn’t have to direct anyone. You could just observe human nature and make photographs in a split-second. It was all about timing.” Meyerowitz started capturing his special vision with a 35mm Ashahi Pentax, and eventually invested in a Leica. Today, he also shoots with an 8x10 Deardorff, and likens this variety of cameras to a musician who express themselves with several instruments. “I use the small camera on the street for spontaneous observations, and I use the large-format camera in a place like Cape Cod in a more meditative way—something like the difference between jazz and classical music—where there’s space.”

New York City, 1975

When It All Comes Together
When asked at what point he actually became a professional photographer, Meyerowitz began by saying that during the ’60s, people weren’t really making a living in the art world. “I remember that in 1964, I saw an exhibition of Ansel Adams’ work in the only New York gallery that existed, and his photographs were selling for $25–$50 apiece. But even in the ’60s he was a legend.” Magazines and advertising were the only viable options for making money in photography, and he wasn’t interested in selling stories to magazines. “I was left making a living as a free-lance art director and using the camera to make my own stories about life,” he says. Within a year, he had a black-and-white photo in a show called “The Photographer’s Eye” on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. “So you could say that because I had this one photo on exhibit, I was a professional in that regard,” he comments. And serendipitously, his photo was hanging next to one by Robert Frank—“the man who was the chief reason I became a photographer.” Besides Frank, Meyerowitz’ influences include noted street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Garry Winogrand, early 20th century photographer Eugene Atget (“the Mozart of photography”), Walker Evans (“who made me see what was possible as an artist”), and German portrait photographer August Sander.

 Meyerowitz says that his first impulse photographically was to go out on the street. “It seemed that watching real life unfold in front of me, and trying to take a little piece of it,” he reflects, “at the moment where there was some gesture, or interaction between several things happening at the same time—that to me was the source of what photography was all about. It was about spontaneity, perception and observing human nature without intervening in any way, except to be as invisible as I could, and as close to what was happening as possible.” It wasn’t really documentary photography, Meyerowitz points out. “It’s just everyday life on the streets in the culture I live in.” He wanted to build a body of work over time that would have meaning when viewed in its entirety. He was convinced he could make pictures in the chaos of the street, and became very successful in doing so.

Red Interior, Provincetown, 1977

Broadening His Scope
Since 1962, he adds, he’s been a major advocate for color photography, even though it wasn’t considered art in the early ’60s. “Black-and-white was what photography was about,” he states. “The resistance to color photography was what I felt I had to overcome.” Meyerowitz preferred Kodachrome II for 35mm cameras during the ’60s and ’70s for its slow 25 ASA. “That film’s inherent beauty led me to use the large-format view camera,” he says. “The film and cameras I used allowed me to see and to live in a certain time frame and to make these photographs. It’s how you become cultivated by your medium.”

Eventually, Meyerowitz assessed his situation and decided to make a few changes. “I felt like I needed to grow beyond the street photography platform I was working on, where all pictures seemed to be about capturing this disappearing moment,” he says. “This propelled me to make a different type of image—what I called a ‘field photograph,’ in which everything in the frame was interesting.” He began to shoot pictures with no central incident that attracted the viewer’s attention. “You had to read the picture and get a feeling of place at a particular moment—a street in New York City, a street in Paris. It would hold meaning in a different way,” he says. Once he began printing these images, he decided that they needed a greater descriptive power. “I made this jump to an 8x10 format, which is the opposite of working in 35mm,” he says. He managed to bring a street photographer’s sense of observation to a more meditative, slower method of making pictures. “It made me reconsider my values; my sense of what was important. Even time became different.”

Five More Found, 2001

An Archive of Monumental Proportions
On September 11, 2001, both Meyerowitz and his wife were in Massachusetts—she was in Provincetown and he was in Chatham. “She called and told me to get to a television because some dreadful tragedy was happening in New York,” he says. “I watched the attacks take place and immediately tried to go back there, but was unable to because they had closed the city.” When the ban on travel was lifted, he and his wife returned to their apartment, which was less than two miles from the World Trade Center. Meyerowitz went down to the site, only to discover that it had been cordoned off from the public and press alike. “I stood on the sidelines because that’s where everybody was forced,” he says, “but I wanted to physically do something.” Although he was several blocks away, he raised his Leica to his eye, and was promptly given a sharp rebuttal from a female police officer.

Rudy Giuliani, then Mayor of New York, deemed the area a crime scene and banned photography at Ground Zero. When Meyerowitz heard this, his initial thought was, “you can’t do this—we need to see a record of one of the most profound things that had ever happened here. That’s when I realized that I must make the record.” His anger gave way to inspiration, which propelled him to go in and make an archive for the people of New York. With his

A Welder Wounder, 2001

large-format camera, he repeatedly forced his way in to the site (called “The Pile” by many of the workers), and was thrown out on a daily basis. “Nonetheless, I continued to do the work, because it was an important thing to do.” Eventually he got a worker’s badge from a friend and a letter from the Museum of History in New York, and used these credentials to get inside. “I would find an opening because there were many places to enter the site, and I’d catch some cop who wasn’t thinking clearly,” he says. “I’d show my badge and letter and get in.” Nonetheless, he was still ordered to leave every day. A newspaper did a story on Meyerowitz’ work on Ground Zero and reported incorrectly that he was the only photographer allowed on the site. However, his tenacity finally paid off.

“Ultimately, after many months of wrangling, I worked out a contractual relationship with the city through the museum,” he says. “In the meantime, I had made friends with a group of detectives and based on the negotiations that were going on, those detectives took me up to police headquarters and got me an NYPD picture I.D., so I had a legitimate badge calling me the Mayor’s photographer, even though I didn’t have the signed contract.” Again, luck enabled him to stay on and do his work. Meyerowitz began shooting Ground Zero on September 23, 2001 and made his last picture of the site nine months later on June 21, 2002.

In October 2001, after he had been shooting for about a month, the network program, "Sunday Morning" did a piece on Meyerowitz. Brian Sexton, a representative in charge of cultural affairs from the State Department, happened to be running on a treadmill at his home in Washington when he saw Meyerowitz on T.V. “He called me and said, ‘listen, we need to create an exhibition to send around the world to our friends and enemies alike. We need to show these photographs to prove that it actually happened.’” Together he and Meyerowitz looked at the photos and created 35 exhibitions of about 28 pictures. “They’ve been seen by over 4 million people in 80 countries and 300 or 400 cities,” he says. A year later, the State Department made Meyerowitz a cultural ambassador so that he could travel with his exhibitions, “and to be a sort of emissary to help restore America’s image goodwill.” Periodically, he still travels on behalf of the U.S. In September 2006, the powerful book, Aftermath was published to coincide with the five-year anniversary of 9/11.

Past and Present
Throughout his career, Meyerowitz’ images have appeared in 15 books, including Bystander: The History of Street Photography, which he did with Colin Westerbeck; Tuscany: Inside the Light, about the quality of light in Tuscany; Redheads, “portraits of people with that particular gene,” and his first book, Cape Light, which has sold over 125,000 copies during its 25-year run. He has upcoming exhibits in different parts of the world, and is working on a retrospective book of 45 years of his images.

Park Panorama

He’s also currently working on a project in which he’s photographing the parks of New York City, which encompass 29,000 acres of parkland inside the five Burroughs of New York. “It’s actually considered the greenest city in the world,” Meyerowitz says. “Much of it is wild in a way that nobody would believe. New York has marshes, swamplands, coastlines, forests and deep woods.” He’s creating a historic archive of these parks for the 21st century, he reports, which will be an archive, a book and a traveling exhibit. Hewlett Packard is the first sponsor for the first year of this two-year project. “All the images will be printed on their new pigment-based printers, which have a print life of 200 years,” he states. “This project came right on the heels of Ground Zero, so it’s nice to do another New York project that’s not about disaster and rubble.”

To learn more about Joel Meyerowitz, visit www.joelmeyerowitz.com.

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TO SEE A GALLERY OF JOEL MEYEROWITZ' IMAGES, CLICK HERE

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