OUT IN THE STREET
WITH JOEL MEYEROWITZ
Joel Meyerowitz has spent his life in a state of creative attunement. Listen to him speak about his photography for even a few moments, and you understand the intensity of his perception, the pleasure that radiates from his desire to make the “humble everyday gesture turn into the sublime”, as he notes in the new edition of his 1983 book Wild Flowers. Turning the everyday into the sublime — it's a succinct but perfect summation of his artistic ethos, and it’s also the gift he gives to those who immerse themselves in his work. To be taken in by Meyerowitz, whether it’s through his kinetic early 35mm street photography, his gentle large-format seascapes and elegiac Provincetown portraits, or his observational snapshots of life in motion, is to not only inhabit an ephemeral moment, but to, like the artist himself, become more observant and open to the details and sensations in the world around you.
It’s how I felt when first encountering his images of vacant motel swimming pools at daybreak or Manhattan streets punctured by midday light and congested with bygone life. Through his lens, my experience with those spaces thereafter was distinctly altered, charged with a new sense of awareness. The more time I spent with Wild Flowers — a playful and romantic assemblage of photographs from 1965 through 2020 in which he uses the motif of flowers as a through line to connect disparate moments of beauty, ritual, and connection—the more I found myself noticing the presence of flowers around me, especially in an urban environment.
Born in 1938, Meyerowitz grew up in the Bronx and studied painting and art history before becoming an art director for an advertising agency in the early 60s. But it was when an assignment gave him the chance to observe Robert Frank at work that he swiftly and instinctually decided to pick up a camera and go find himself out on the street. Six decades on, Meyerowitz remains one of the most celebrated photographers in the world, a pioneer of both street and color photography whose images helped elevate the medium to the pantheon of fine art. His influence has seeped into the visual lexicon of contemporary culture, whether it’s on cinema screens or iPhones, and has become a touchstone for everyone from filmmakers to fashion designers.
Now at eighty-three, his creative impulses continue to bloom, forever in pursuit of what sparks his curiosity and challenges new ways of engaging with his craft. Most recently, Meyerowitz collaborated with the creative director couple Luke and Lucie Meier and art director Heiko Keinath on Jil Sander’s Fall/Winter 2021 campaign, creating a gorgeous and playfully elegant collection of photographs that feel at home in his body of work. Shot in Tuscany, where Meyerowtiz has a home with his wife Maggie Barrett, the campaign was made over an energetic few days spent discovering locations and crafting the atmosphere of intimacy and spontaneity that Meyerowitz loves to work in.
This summer, Meyerowitz generously took some time for a couple of unhurried phone calls — he in Tuscany and me in Brooklyn—about the awakenings that have fueled his career and the brushes with fate that guided him.
