Meyerowitz: From Street to Still Life

Joel Meyerowitz (1938-present) has worked in several areas of photography over a career that spans almost six decades. Starting as a street photographer in New York City in the 1960s, he later branched into landscape, portrait, and still life photography. He was also the main photographer to document the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center towers.^[1]

Meyerowitz is sometimes overshadowed by his contemporaries Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) and Diane Arbus (1923-1971).^[2] However, his photography is more open and optimistic than theirs; his images display a lightness of touch and skillful use of colour that I find appealing.^[3] In this article, I review both his long career and his approach to photography.

Street

Meyerowitz grew up in the Bronx, where he amused himself by watching people on the street.^[4] As a young man he went to Ohio State University to study painting for a fine arts degree, then moved back to New York to take a job as an art director in an advertising agency. After a chance meeting with photographer Robert Frank in 1962, he quit his job for street photography.^[5]

Meyerowitz started out using two 35 mm cameras, one with black-and-white film and one with colour film, although he moved exclusively to colour in the early 1970s. His best street images feature loose composition with a lot of detail—one critic writes that Meyerowitz possesses “a nervous skill of filling every inch of the frame with balanced and dynamic formal elements”.^[6]

Examples of Meyerowitz’s loose but detailed style are Fallen Man, Paris, 1967 and New York City Streets, 1975.^[7] In Fallen Man, a young man lies on his back at a busy city intersection; people in the crowd have turned to look at him, but no one helps him up and one workman, hammer in hand, casually steps over him. In New York City Streets, a couple on the left-hand side of the image dressed in tan coats walks away from the camera into a cloud of steam, while two more people walk away on the right-hand side of the image, also dressed in tan coats, each with the shadow of another person’s head on their backs. The weird complexity of this image—a “lucky coincidence”—makes it seem like a movie still.^[8]

In the late 1970s, Meyerowitz moved from a 35 mm Leica to an 8 x 10-inch view camera. The view camera had a much longer set up time, and made Meyerowitz take a more deliberate approach.^[9] He did a series of clever photographs showing different views of the Empire State Building, with the building often lurking somewhere in the background—for example, appearing at the end of a street or as a tiny figure almost lost in the distance.^[10] He followed this later with photographs of St. Louis, Missouri, featuring the Gateway Arch in the foreground or background, and of Atlanta, Georgia, featuring IBM’s Atlantic Center office building from various views.^[11]

Landscape

Meyerowitz began photographing the Cape Cod area (where he and his family spent their summers) with his 8 x 10-inch view camera in the late 1970s. These images include cottage laundry blowing in the wind, cars parked at a restaurant, and sunsets or sunrises over Atlantic with the horizon set firmly—and unconventionally—in the middle of the image.^[12]

As Kevin Moore writes in his book on American colour photography in the 1970s and 1980s: “Meyerowitz’s…sunsets, beaches and cottage architecture skirted dangerously close to clichés—postcards, calendar art, and Sierra Club pictures—yet managed to transcend those low genres through the subtle effects of the chromogenic print. The saturation of the color, the density of detail, allowing even for glimpses of trash here and there, offered a purity of vision, which seemed to signal a return to traditional photographic values.”^[13]

Ballston Beach, Truro, 1976 shows the influence of Meyerowitz’s earlier street photography. The back of a lifeguard’s elevated chair dominates the centre of the image, with the horizon set at the mid-point. Below the horizon several swimmers stand at more-or-less equally spaced intervals, one carrying a surfboard. Then there is a cluster of bodies in motion at the extreme left of the image, as two men carry two women on their shoulders. The effect is one of careful balance disrupted by the moving bodies on the left—this gives the image a mix of calmness and tension, which saves it from being a cliché.^[14]

Meyerowitz also photographed landscapes in Tuscany, Italy later in his career.^[15] The Tuscany photographs feature beautiful light and are more classically symmetrical than Meyerowitz’s earlier work.^[16]

Portrait

During the 1980s, Meyerowitz shot a series of portraits in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which were collected into a book in 2019.^[17] Located at the end of Cape Cod, Provincetown was a popular vacation spot for gay and mixed-race couples at time when they were not accepted elsewhere. The portraits are traditionally composed, with the subjects looking straight into the camera, often with the beach or ocean in the background.^[18]

Meyerowitz writes that he wanted to capture the “freshness of experiencing life” in these photographs: “For me, that means making portraits without artifice, with no self-important look, no pretzel-like posture, no compositional strategy.”^[19]

In my favourite image, Caroline and Margaret, 1983, two women in bathing suits hold hands and stand on a wood ledge by the sea; the woman on the left is pointing her toes downwards and has a tentative expression. The woman on the left also is positioned so that her body stretches nearly from the top of the image to the bottom, creating a dividing line. The image is notable for its careful composition and for its use of light colours (the light blues of the ocean and sky, and the pale skin of the woman on the left).^[20]

Aftermath

Meyerowitz was in Massachusetts on the day of the 9/11 attack but returned to New York City five days later. Mayor Rudy Giuliani banned photographers from the World Trade Centre site, but Meyerowitz was able to visit the site regularly for eight months, due to his persistence, his personal connections, and the help of sympathetic site workers.^[21] Twenty-eight of his 8,000 photographs of the site clean-up were later shown as part of a U.S. government touring exhibit and collected into the book Aftermath.^[22]

The “almost purely descriptive” images show the chaos of the World Trade Centre site, as workers searched for bodies and cleared the wreckage: they range from panoramic shots of the site to portraits of individual site workers.^[23] Smoke Rising in Sunlight, New York City, 2001 shows girders poking through the rubble like stumps, with excavators and workers in front of the blackened hulk of a building. Explosion Squad Detective, 2001 shows a man with a striped bandana on his head, holding a hard hat and peering straight into the camera, with the site wreckage appearing in the unfocused background.

The 9/11 images have attracted a variety of critical or academic commentaries, including articles by David Campany, Miles Orvell and Chris Vanderwees.^[24]

Campany acknowledges a bias for still photography as the official record of events but then argues that Meyerowitz’s images were only a “trace of [a] trace of an event”, as they came days or weeks after the attack and portrayed only its consequences.^[25] He takes the 9/11 images as the starting point for a general discussion of the role of still photography, arguing that it has taken up the mantle of the undertaker or the accountant: “It turns up late, wanders through the places where things have happened totting up the effects of the world’s activity. This is a kind of photograph that foregoes the representation of events in progress and so cedes them to other media.”^[26]

Orvell observes that Meyerowitz responded to the World Trade Center site on two levels: “the wreckage is awful, but it is also in some sense beautiful.”^[27] He points out that Meyerowitz has compared certain 9/11 images to paintings by Rembrant, Jean-François Millet and Caspar David Friedrich. By doing so, Meyerowitz offers “a perfect illustration of interpictoriality bridging photography and the fine arts”, which provides continuity with past art and mitigates the uniqueness of 9/11.^[28] Yet these historical comparisons do not fully explain the reality of the World Trade Center site.

“[N]one of these analogies capture what is unique in the visual record that Meyerowitz creates in Aftermath—a relentless depiction of the twisted wreckage itself—the beams, the chunks of concrete, the steel frames of the buildings. Meyerowitz…is giving us a scene in which the material remnants of the World Trade Center, indescribably twisted and intertwined, form a nondescript landscape of junk and detritus seen under varying conditions of natural and artificial light.”^[29]

Vanderwees argues that Meyerowitz’s images function as a form of state propaganda, used to gain sympathy for the U.S. in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. He rejects the position that the images are purely descriptive, writing that they are “deliberately and artistically composed, exercising a complex perspective, which is acutely aware of tensions surrounding aesthetics and the ethics of representation.”^[30] However, he takes the view that Meyerowitz’s allusions to historical paintings and to the ruins of Rome and Pompeii also give the images more open-ended possibilities.^[31]

Still Life

Most recently, Meyerowitz has photographed objects from the studios of painters Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) and Paul Cezanne (1839-1906).^[32] These still life photographs are notable for their colours, textures, and skillful use of available light.^[33]

Meyerowitz has also worked with still life objects in his own studio in Italy. I particularly like The Bride and Her Suitors, which shows a tailor’s dummy and a cluster of metal objects.^[34] “If you had asked me a decade or less ago whether or not I’d be interested in moving objects around on a tabletop and photographing them, I’d have laughed at you,” Meyerowitz says in an interview from 2019.^[35]

Approach

Meyerowitz discusses his approach to photography in two books, each with a different target audience: How I Make Photographs, for adults, and Seeing Things, for children.^[36]

In How I Make Photographs, Meyerowitz writes about the need for an open and positive attitude to the street and the people being photographed.^[37] Avoid being cruel or taking advantage of people, he says, but don’t shy away from difficult shots. Also, pay close attention to your surroundings so you can anticipate when something interesting might happen.

“Humans do the same things all the time. If you understand that, you can watch the world with a sense of the possibility that these things are going to happen. You can almost predict movements, gestures and actions. That way, you’re always a little ahead of the game. You’re ready to step into the right space at the right moment, near enough that when an event happens, you’re there.”^[38]

Look for small details that attract your attention and then combine those details into a larger scene. Also, move the main point of interest away from the centre of the image to spread the energy over the frame. “If you make the picture interesting enough, any person who looks at it will read across the frame—from the centre to the upper corner and down the side, for example, rather than just looking at the thing in the centre.”^[39]

In Seeing Things, Meyerowitz discusses selected photographs shot in different periods and different styles, explaining the main idea behind each and (sometimes) what it teaches us about life.

Alex Webb’s Children Playing in a Playground, Havana, 2000, shows a busy playground, with several children standing, sitting or hanging on a metal climber.^[40] This photograph works because Webb was willing to move closer to the action, until “he could see how the curving lines of the jungle gym and the moving figures of the kids created a spiderweb of energy.”^[41] While order is seen as the basis of beauty, “that doesn’t mean chaos can’t be beautiful too.”^[42]

On Meyerowitz’s own Fallen Man, Paris, 1967, he writes that a photograph doesn’t need to tell the full story. Why did the young man fall down in the street? As the photograph captures only one instant of time, it can’t answer that question—and that is part of the point. “Ambiguity is an important quality in art, in particular, because it can keep you, the viewer, wondering and interested.”^[43]

Posted: June 2022 (revised with minor edits, February 2023).

For Further Information

Meyerowitz’s own website contains a wide selection his photography, although, frustratingly, the photographs do not include titles or dates: joelmeyerowitz.com.

For a collection of Meyerowitz’s 9/11 photographs, see the Whitney Museum site at https://whitney.org/artists/3504?q%5Bs%5D=sort_date%20desc.

For a good overview of Meyerowitz’s career, see his latest retrospective: Joel Meyerowitz, Where I Find Myself: A Lifetime Retrospective (London: Laurence King, 2018).