Roger Davies - The Art for Home Interview
Joel Meyerowitz
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Joel Meyerowitz was born in the Bronx in 1938 in a neighborhood that offered daily lessons in the divine comedy and tragedies of human behavior. It was that “street” education that nurtured his delight in human observation, a perception that is at the heart of his photography.
After studying painting, art history, and medical illustration at Ohio State University, he worked as an art director in advertising in the early 60’s. In 1962, Robert Frank made photographs for a booklet Meyerowitz designed, and it was while watching Frank work that he discovered that photographs could be made while both the photographer and the subject were in motion. The power of this observation made Meyerowitz quit his job immediately, borrow a camera, and go out onto the streets of New York. He has been on the streets ever since.
While Meyerowitz never felt constrained by any one discipline of photography, he says, “street photography was the only form of the medium that owed nothing to painting nor to the other plastic arts. It is purely photographic.” He feels that such a starting point naturally prompts one to question the world around them. This restless energy and open approach to subject matter has produced such …
Joel Meyerowitz was born in the Bronx in 1938 in a neighborhood that offered daily lessons in the divine comedy and tragedies of human behavior. It was that “street” education that nurtured his delight in human observation, a perception that is at the heart of his photography.
After studying painting, art history, and medical illustration at Ohio State University, he worked as an art director in advertising in the early 60’s. In 1962, Robert Frank made photographs for a booklet Meyerowitz designed, and it was while watching Frank work that he discovered that photographs could be made while both the photographer and the subject were in motion. The power of this observation made Meyerowitz quit his job immediately, borrow a camera, and go out onto the streets of New York. He has been on the streets ever since.
While Meyerowitz never felt constrained by any one discipline of photography, he says, “street photography was the only form of the medium that owed nothing to painting nor to the other plastic arts. It is purely photographic.” He feels that such a starting point naturally prompts one to question the world around them. This restless energy and open approach to subject matter has produced such varied work as; A Question of Color (Tate Modern 2024); Photographs From a Moving Car (a one person show at MoMA in 1968), his Guggenheim Fellowship project, Still Going: America During Vietnam, his work with the large format, 8x10 view camera which resulted in such diverse books as; Cape Light (1978), St. Louis and The Arch (1980), A Summer’s Day (1985), Redheads (1991), Bay/Sky (1993), Aftermath: The World Trade Center Archive (2006), and others.
Meyerowitz is a recipient of both the NEA and NEH awards. He was the only photographer to gain unrestricted access to Ground Zero after 9/11, which produced a body of work that led Meyerowitz to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale for Architecture in 2002. His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, Tate Modern, The Victoria & Albert Museum, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk Museum and others worldwide. Meyerowitz lives and works in London and New York.
Born 1938
Hometown New York, NY
Lives and Works New York, NY and London, UK
Works Available for Purchase
No works
