Interview: Joel Meyerowitz

Today’s interview is with Joel Meyerowitz, a photographer who needs no introduction. John Saponara, TMC member who also worked as Joel’s archive manager from 2000-2005 and helped operate his workshop in Tuscany, graciously interviewed Joel. I think I’ve read over Joel’s first answer five times and still can’t get over it.

John Saponara: “Too Much Chocolate” is geared towards emerging photographers and  I’d love for you to share the story of how you got your start in photography.

Joel Meyerowitz: In 1962 I was a painter, working as an art director, at a small agency in New York, I didn’t know anything about photography. But Harry Gordon, the agency’s senior art director, had a passion for the medium and would regularly call on people like Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus. They were Harry’s buddies and he would call them to do jobs for him.  Coming from my painting background, I thought photography was just for advertising; and the only name I knew from its history was Matthew Brady. But Harry knew; and one afternoon he sent me down to a location where Robert Frank was shooting a commercial job. He told me just watch what he did: making sure he covered all the points we needed for the shoot. It was a little booklet we were doing for a Conde Nast publication on girls who were ten-teen before they were thirteen, that was the concept. Previously I’d only been on fashion shoots, and as I stood behind Robert, watching him work, I became aware of a feeling that I had never experienced before.

I suddenly realized that photography was something you did physically, and there was movement to it. You didn’t have to direct your models to stop, to hold that pose, or to move their heads a little bit to the right or left: all that was unnecessary.  Robert was barely speaking to these girls: just moving around them; and every time I heard the click of the Leica it seemed almost like a seizure in time, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I learned that life has these little clicks in it: and you can keep moving; and as I was watching the models, I started trying to anticipate when the clicks would come, and he and I were in sync a number of times. As the shutter went off it seemed, for an infinitesimal part of a second, as if life had set itself, and then started moving again. Leaving there two hours later I couldn’t get it out of my mind; and walking out into the street, I kept seeing moments frozen in time: people sticking out a hand for a taxi, or pausing momentarily to look into a shop window, suddenly seemed framed, and infinitesimally frozen for the camera. Innocent everyday non-incidents, became stop time moments; and by the time I got off the bus at 53rd Street I was so hooked that I went upstairs and quit my job. I went straight to Harry and said “I’m going to quit this job and go out to make photographs.”

JS: How do you think the process differs today from when you were establishing yourself in the 60’s and 70’s?
JM: Back in my day it was like laying bricks. Slow and steady and labor intensive. Probably today it’s similar for those who believe in themselves and the medium, in that it always takes a deep personal commitment to the mystery and craft of this special system we love. But what is different today is the means at your disposal for transmitting the work that you do. In my time it was a one-on-one means of showing/sharing work and it had to be done in person so the person you showed it to could clearly see that you were a young, wet behind the ears, photographer. Now you can shoot a “slide” show to people across the globe and they don’t know who you are and only have the work to deal with. But that’s really a plus for all of you.

JS: The digital/Internet age has changed the dynamics of the photography world. Some Photo Exhibitions and magazines are being curated and viewed exclusively online, changing the way we see images, on our monitor rather than on the printed page, pixels instead of grain. I know how involved you are in the printing of your books and exhibitions and how important the accuracy of the reproductions are to you. What are your thoughts on some of these changes? Do you get the sense that there is a loss of importance to the physical document? Or does this make the physical negative and the physical print all the more important?
JM: Like I was saying earlier, I appreciate the new opportunities the web offers to disseminate information and work. But make no mistake, the ‘virtual’ aspect of images and the screen size both diminish the impact a photograph can make on our eye and mind when we either hold it in our hand or see it on a wall. But here again, what we have today makes a new advantage available, with the ease of making a real book through the services available on the web, such as a Blurb book, or iPhoto etc. The power of seeing one’s work flow through the pages is a great new possibility.

JS: How have you and your studio had to adapt to the changing photography world in the digital age?

JM: I’ve always felt that since photography is a technology - right from it’s invention - and that it always moves forward through new mechanical developments, that I should be both aware and willing to go towards the new rather than stay fixed in a conservative position. Yet, while saying that, I still use and love film, particularly large format film, so I play both sides of the game. In 1992 I got involved with archiving my work digitally, and taught myself Photoshop when it was 2.5 so I go way back in a sense. I felt, and this was a deep, intuitive feeling, that here was a virtual darkroom that could do things in a more controlled way than ever before, and so I leaped into it with no looking back. Now my studio is completely digital, as far as archiving, scanning, printing, etc go. And I’ve always been a Mac addict, beginning in 1977 when I bought my first computer. I use a drum scanner as well as an Imacon, and a Creo flat bed, and I’m devoted to HP printers, particularly the Z series, 12 pigment, large format printers, which deliver prints superior to wet, darkroom prints.

JS: I know that you shot many of your most well known works on your Deardorff 8×10, which is slow and methodical, but I always remember the street photographer in you. walking the streets of NYC, bobbing and weaving with your Leica 35mm working the street corners, very fluid and ready to pounce on the right moment. Can you talk a little bit about those two formats, your transition between the two and your working methods for each?
JM: While working on the streets of New York with the Leica I began to see that the slowness of color film and therefore the depth of space it rendered, was forcing me to slow down and make photographs from further back than I had before. This slight adjustment of space and time produced a new kind of image for me, one that emptied the center of the frame of its nominal subject, “the hook” that I had previously built my photographs on, and instead opened the frame to multiple, more fragmentary, simultaneous events. This gave me a new sense of the street as a place where everything was important; the buildings near and far; the movement of people; the basic street furnishings of light poles, phone booths, hydrants, trees, signs, store  windows, all of it cohering in a way that broke open the form of my earlier work.  I called these new, non-hierarchical pictures, “field photographs,” because everything in the frame was now in play, and the more complex and open-ended I could make the image the more interesting it became to me.  I felt I was testing the descriptive limits of the photograph by asking; how much dissonance can a photograph contain and still be readable?  Can interesting pictures be made without depending on a central event to hold it together? What does color mean in a photograph?

During this time I was printing in color but found that the 35mm prints were not as descriptive as the kodachrome slides they came from and I wanted more from the print. This passion for description led me, in 1976, to buy an 8×10 inch wooden, Deardorff view camera. Working with it was completely different than the physicality of the handheld camera, but ultimately led me to a way of working that I had earlier, and with youthful prejudice, thought only those old guys -Adams and Weston – would use.  What a shock then, to see how quickly I was captured by its advantages as well as its limitations. The history of art is filled with artists who put resistance in their path in order to reinvent their method of working.  By using a 19th century style camera with contemporary color film I gave myself an opportunity to ask questions about timing, content, and complexity, about space and light, about what constitutes and defines the landscape, about how to make a portrait, and perhaps most challenging of all to contemporary artists, what role does the “beautiful” play in photography?

Within the first two years of working with the view camera I developed four bodies of work; Cape Light, St. Louis and the Arch, the Empire State Building and the Florida pools at dusk series. Each of these inquiries helped teach me how to bring the spontaneous, jazzy riffs of street photography closer to the more contemplative, classical tempo of the large format camera. Previously, photographs held themselves to intimate dimensions: little mirrors of the world, but large format color film offered a grain-less expansiveness which allowed tiny details far away to be clearly seen. With that discovery came a certain risk, I began to see differently, little things mattered more; the way light defined a space, the wind brushing the surface of the water, the way a persons clothes fit, relationships between places and people. Earlier when I worked cloaked in the invisibility of the street I never confronted anyone nor asked to make their portrait, but with my increased visibility; standing next to the large camera, people would often ask about the camera and what I was doing. I began to see that people were interesting.  I found I could ask to make a photograph of someone, and then, in effect, was granted a license to stare at another human being. Skin, hair, scars, beauty marks, the way clothing looked and what it said about the people who wore it became a new fascination. Especially demanding was finding a way to cross the social barrier we all maintain in order to tell some stranger that I needed to make their photograph.

By working out of doors and seeing people standing in the open space rather than in the closed space of a studio I developed a new feeling for space itself, as well as for the person standing there. I found myself drawn to the somewhat perverse idea of using this camera, which can describe everything, to describe almost nothing. I began to look beyond the person toward the big bowl of space of the sea and sky. I looked at where air meets water, the delicate changing tones of atmosphere and light, the play of seasons and weather, and asked myself can I photograph emptiness?

JS: You recently finished work on the retrospective which is being published by Phaidon in Spring 2010.
JM: I can’t imagine how difficult it must’ve been having to comb through over 40 years of work and make a selection that would tell your photographic story.  Can you go through what that process was like and maybe describe some of the tough choices you had to make while editing for it? Were there times early in the process where you thought “this image has to be in” but later on found yourself sacrificing it?

Editing for something as full as a lifetime of work certainly poses interesting challenges. First there’s the opportunity to review everything. What a trip that is! So many twists and turns, roads not taken, dead ends, unexpected openings that transform the work and one’s life. So taking it all in once again is a way of identifying who I was at the various moments of consciousness along the way. It’s about trying to make sense of the rhythm of life and work, and what are the essential elements in the work that are genuine and that form the ‘core’ of me, the man, as well as me the artist. And these two aren’t really separate, it’s just that sometimes there are splits along the way, and so aligning them is part of the discovery of making a retrospective work.

Then after ‘reading’ all the work you become familiar again with who you were when you were young and if you are honest, and try not to rewrite your own history to make it seem perfect, you can begin to understand the momentum that developed in your life. After that, choosing the photographs requires being open to letting your old favorites fall away, and letting lesser images, which may have been the real glue holding bodies of work together, come into the light in a new way. What I’m getting at is that the process is, after all, one of looking back from where one is now! And what you know NOW is more than you knew when you were in that moment, so you cannot be an innocent again. But finding a balance between that time of youthful discovery and the present is where the work gathers its real meaning. And that is where I am now!

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