How I Make Photographs: Joel Meyerowitz in conversation with Amanda Hajjar

hello welcome everyone i'm amanda hajar the director of exhibitions at photography new york photographiska is a museum of photography founded in stockholm in 2010 and we opened here in new york on 22nd and park in december of 2019. due to the covid crisis we have to close our doors in mid-march but since then we've been very busy providing the photography community with an online platform called the photo sessions where we're hosting artist talks behind the scene looks into artist studios the making of their work and telling stories that bring you into the world of our photographers we release something new each week featuring exclusives with some of the world's most admired artists today we're here with joel meyerowitz to discuss his life career and his new book how i make photographs hi joel how are you hi amanda i'm great how are you doing doing okay doing okay um so a brief introduction to joel of course he's world-renowned famous photographer he was born in 1938 and he is a bronx native he studied at ohio state he began his career as an art director in advertising in the 60s where he actually met robert frank and subsequently quit his job in advertising to start his career in photography a renowned street photographer joel worked in color when this was deemed as not a serious art of course most photographers at this time were working in black and white this has turned into a distinguished career for the past 58 years or so so yeah dozens of books have been published on joel's work he's been exhibited more than 350 exhibitions he's a guggenheim fellow and his work is in the collections of moma the met the whitney the boston museum of fine arts and the art institute of chicago and so today we're here to discuss joel meyerowitz how i make photographs and joel we just wanted to start a little bit about your beginnings and your early life here in new york and how sort of you got started in your career photography sure it's a familiar story to me but i'm happy to share it you know it's one of those stories that's like how did this happen to me i was a painter and going to graduate school for art history but i was working a day job as a graphic designer and i designed a little booklet and my boss the head art director hired his friend robert frank i knew nothing about photography and i didn't know who robert frank was i thought he was a commercial photographer doing this job when i went down to the location and saw him work it was as if a realm of possibility opened right in front of me the way he moved he was photographing two pre-teenage girls after school doing homework putting on makeup playing games having milk and cookies i mean ordinary stuff but for some reason every time i heard the click of his leica the action in front of him seemed to reach a peak even if it was a delicate thing like a look or the turn of a head or you know the way the hair fell something seemed to have moment to it and i was so entranced by this that when i left the chute and went out on the street everything on the street was alive to me in a way that it had never been before and i suddenly thought life the the the invisible moment can be stopped by that click of a camera and i walked all the way back to my office instead of taking a bus or a subway and in in an hour on the street i had this life change happen and when i entered the office and my boss said oh hey how was the shoot and i said oh no the shoot was great harry i'm quitting on friday oh was it a disaster and i said no no no i've discovered what i need to do i have to be out on the street photographing wow that's such an epiphany sort of light bulb moment it is exactly it's an epiphany and i i really want to share this with everybody because it's possible for all of you too to have one of these unexpected turns of events that change your life it happens as fast as that and and it has given me this incredible opportunity to spend the last 58 years out in the world responding to the unexpected beauties and harmonies and sensitive moments and and the the the joy of being alive in the world and watching these things happen in front of me and learning how to anticipate them which i think is at the heart of the kind of photography i started to do although i've done other things since at the heart of it still is the unexpected moment that reveals itself precisely because you as an artist and as a human being are tuned your instrument is tuned to acknowledge the unexpected and reach for it i mean i i in this book we say that carrying a camera is a license to see and i've always felt that that's what it is i i'm i've got this instrument that's going to record every nuance of the life that unfolds in front of me that brings me to a moment of consciousness and and that's it basically to live a conscious life which one hopes to achieve in the course of your life can be somehow enlarged through photography [Music] and did you ever have a chance to sort of tell robert frank about this experience and say you know watching you on the street this has inspired my life this has i did i i unfortunately too many times you know as a young photographer you think that the well-known photographer doesn't remember but of course he he remembered and and he was joel it's all right it's all right yeah i understand yeah you told me that that's really wonderful he's not one he wasn't one who really wanted sycophants around him in that way you know he he had his coterie of close friends and and i can't say that i was but i went to dinner at his house numerous times and his first wife mary who's a wonderful artist in her own right became a good friend robert though moved to nova scotia and so he wasn't in new york you know all the time and and and so our relationship didn't develop into the kind of of depth that one would would hope for i was much closer with gary winogrand he was my i mean for i would say five years gary and i met every single day and went out from early in the morning till it was time to pick up his kids at school so i i had it with gary in a way that um you know i couldn't with with robert right right and so tell us a little bit about new york at this time and the photographers that you're talking about this this concept of black and white photography really being kind of the upper echelon of photography and you're working in color and you're starting out and what's happening in new york in the 60s and 70s at this point you know it's it's a it's a a lovely question to start with because you know it's history now anything back 50 years back or more is real history and you know in in 1962 when i began and i knew nothing about photography um when i borrowed the camera from my boss i went out and bought two rolls of kodachrome film because i i thought oh i get it processed i'll be able to see the pictures tomorrow i didn't have a dark room i wasn't thinking black and white and and you know at that point there was only one gallery in new york moma had showed the the family of man a sort of you know a big overblown show of you know hundreds of photographs from the schmaltziest photographs to the toughest photographs but it didn't have a program that was dynamic in the sense that it became later on when john tcharkovsky took over mama in 1962 and basically his program of exhibitions educated my generation and and but but sticking with the idea of color i i i put it in because it was like life and i thought photography you know describes life so i should make it like life why not use color and only afterwards when i started to show my pictures to other young photographers did the the response cometh well you know it's color color is for amateurs color is for weddings and bar mitzvahs it's for reportage it's not serious and i thought that's nonsense it's as serious as anything else it's a photograph and and you know it was a struggle and unfortunately on my first not a experience at a lab um when i picked up my pictures there was a light box to look at the photographs on with a with a magnifier and at the light box next to me was another young guy bearded like me long hair like me and he's looking at color slides too and we begin to like chat with each other and it turns out he was a graphic designer also but he wanted to be a photographer his name was tony ray jones who became the great english photographer died too young at 30 but he was a great influence on martin parr and tony and i looking at each other's pictures started to feel a camaraderie and we went out to work together we said let's meet tomorrow we'll go shoot you know and uh but he was working so we would meet on the weekends and we would go to the parades in new york as you know very well in the spring and summer there's a parade almost every weekend right right pulaski day puerto rican day you know um you know native american day i don't know italian america christopher columbus that and so there's always a parade and the parade gave us a kind of camouflage we weren't there to photograph the parade itself because that's the same thing all the time flags and batons being tossed and all that stuff floats but afterwards and alongside the parade there are enough human actions that it allowed us to sort of infiltrate and be amongst the crowd photographing people close up so that we could learn about timing exposure the right distance how do how to be close to people without offending them how to overcome our own shyness there were a lot of steps that most people have to go through in order to become street photographers and and on one of these days in 1963 we were at the saint patty's day parade and we see a man photographing twisting and turning he's dressed in a beautiful uh a burberry raincoat and he's got a fedora on and tony says god maybe that's cartier-bresson and and i i say i never saw a picture of him i wouldn't know but he's moving so beautifully tony says go talk to him and he he pushes me so and i'm wearing i'm wearing a world war ii parker with a ratty fox collar and a beard and i go over and i say excuse me sir are you mr cartier-bresson you know my french was not so great he said no i i'm not i use the police and i say no no but just two photographers me and i turn around and tony tony is like hiding you know and i said look at that guy over there and and we think you might be that famous photographer and he's he grabs he says yes i'm catching he says you meet me over there later i take you for coffee cartier-bresson taking two young wise guys for coffee was like it was impossible is it totally impossible and sure enough when the parade was over and this at the end of the parade when the parade is over and it all breaks apart you know we're hanging around and up comes cartier-bresson and he takes us away to his favorite coffee house a german coffee house and for an hour we sit there and katya basson is talking about photography magnum bruce davidson you know i mean all and we're asking questions that he's right with us it's not always a dream it was like it was the dream of any young photographer that the master would actually give you some time wow that's really amazing i mean to be in new york at that time and to meet all these wonderful talented people is really special do you think that things like that are still happening in new york do you think there are still no they're happening i know they're happening because i have a lot of younger friends who are street photographers who all of them have bumped into each other on fifth avenue or union square or in wall street you know the places that they go where action is most interesting today and i'm just writing the an essay for a new book that aperture is publishing on a woman street photographer named melissa o'shaughnessy really interesting pictures and i have a young friend matt stewart from london and we were talking sometime this past year and he said oh melissa he said every time i'm in new york city i bump into her on the street so i know she's out there all the time you know and so it's that kind of thing they get each other and when i'm in new york or in london the same thing happens to me i see certain people again and again next to the photographer's gallery for example in london every time i'm in that neighborhood i bump into a young guy he's maybe english indian descent and he's he's always out with his camera and we always bump into each other and we walk together you know up down region street we walk and maybe we'll get a coffee together so these things i think there's a continuum of generosity between the generations you know it's fun i mean it's really in the simplest of terms it's fun to be mixing it up with people who are aspiring to the same aesthetics that you are you know and it collapses in the age between people which is really the the sweetest of all you know moments well i can imagine bumping into you on the street as a young photographer that's that's got to be one of the greatest moments of their lives and talking to you and walking down the street with you so you're contributing to that narrative which is really wonderful yes but you know we're here because photography in its own way has this similarity let's face it everybody who's using a camera presses a button and makes a photograph and they most of them have the same format right most people are using what is the equivalent of a 35 millimeter camera so in a way you're speaking the same language and if that language is consistent over time and through generations then you're sharing something that has mutual problems mutual revelations uh um you know it and and a history that everybody seems to have been involved in reading about so they know the players through history they know robert frank and winogrand they know lisette modell and deanna arbus they you know it's a larger family and and i think that it it closes the gap in some way so joel i wanted to talk a little bit um about you know your your role documenting 911 um so can you tell us a little bit about september 11th was obviously a tragic day in united states new york history everybody sort of remembers where they were on that day how this has affected their lives the lives of their loved ones could you tell us a little bit about how how you documented that day as a new yorker um and how you were able to get the incredible access that you did get well that's a that's a fun story um i wasn't in new york that day i i have a i had a house on cape cod and i was there for the summer and i was out early early that morning shooting about 20 miles from my house and i got a sudden call from my wife saying get get to a television set someplace and i did and i saw the second i saw the buildings fall and the plane go in and everything and i immediately packed up my gear ran back to provincetown and wanted to go back to new york but was told that the city was essentially closed and our home was in greenwich was in the west village within walking distance of ground zero so it was five days before anybody could enter or leave new york and when when we went back i immediately went down to the site i i hustled like crazy to get there and i was you know i i wanted to help because i'm a native new yorker and i wanted to do something for my city and there was already nothing to do you you know there was no blood to be given there was no uh no one was allowed in except for construction workers to remove debris they didn't need that manpower and so there was nothing to do and i was i was standing on the corner of courtland street right right near the uh the you know the first uh closed space and i could see smoke rising and everything and it was a crowd of people on the street and i raised my camera you know i had i had my light go with me i raised my camera and suddenly i got a smack on my back and i i turned around it was a cop and the cop said to me no photographs buddy this is a crime scene and i said what are you talking about this is the street the crime scene's in there i can take a picture from here i'm a citizen i'm allowed to do that and she said no the mayor said no photography allowed and i said well what about the press and she did the classic gesture she went like this over there buddy and i turned around and there was the press corps about a hundred feet away all guys with boom mics and video cameras and they were tied up with police tape yellow police thing and i said when are they going in and she said never the mayor said no photography allowed and i had one of those epiphanies again the light bulb went off and i thought wait a second i know about archives i had just done this book bystander the history of street photography and colin westrebeck and i had spent years in archives all over the world and i understood how to build an archive and i immediately thought that's what i'll do he says no i say yes he can't tell me that my first amendment rights are going to be taken away from me at a historic moment like this what does he think he is i mean i thought that was crazy and so i started to figure out how to get around the system and i did i was able to reach out to adrian benipe who was the commissioner at that time of manhattan's parks his dad barry benedict founded the green markets in new york such as the one at um union square for example but all the other ones too and i had helped barry when he first started them i documented them for him so that he could get more access anyway i called adrian and said adrian this is joel you know me this is what i want to do and i need your help and he said oh no no i said to him adrian who do you know in the government that could get me in and he said i am the government it was so cute and i thought okay he said meet me to he lived one block away from me on the upper west side so i where my studio was at that time so i met with him and he gave me a pass and the next day he had one of the smokies one of those rangers drive me into the site on a little three-wheeled vehicle and dumped me in ground zero about six days after the first day and there i was in shorts and sneakers and a short sleeve shirt on a very hot day and i'm thinking this place is so dangerous i need a hard hat and i see a a plywood wall and a hat that's hanging on the wall so i walk over i liberated the hat i take it off the wall and i look at it and it says nypd and i think nothing better than that i put that on my head i went and i got a pair of boots out of the place and then i got anyway within a half an hour i was completely outfitted i looked like i belonged there and i had my pass around my neck but it was fraught with cops everywhere throwing me out seven eight times a day because they were following orders you know like in the movies in the world war two movies and then a night or two later i met a team of detectives 11 detectives from the arson explosion squad and when i came to where they were they didn't throw me out they understood what i was doing was important and they said unprintable the mayor and and um we'll take care of you from now on and they protected me 50 days and then when they had to leave they took me into police headquarters and had me badged fingerprinted photographed and i had an nypd legitimate id badge saying the mayor's photographer and from that day on i was free to work in the site and i created this whole body of work which i originally wanted six other photographers to be part of including a filmmaker and an oral historian but because of the mayor i couldn't get any of them and so i had to do it on my own and it took me nine months 12 hours a day or more you know almost every single day of the week for all of that time and it cost me a lot of money you know i had to mortgage my my house on the cape and ultimately sell it and it affected my health um so you know it was something that needed to be done for history's sake and i this is the point i'd like to make for your audience is that sometimes when the bureaucracy stands in your way and you think oh i better give up the possibility that you can work your way around the bureaucracy and do what you want to do is really in your hands i had to beat the bureaucracy of the mayor's office in new york in order to do the thing i wanted to do and to me that was the greatest lesson of that time for me was that my determination to actually do something because you know when someone tells you no and you know that you should there's like no alternative you have to you have to go forward and that's what i got out of that that's a really wonderful lesson i think especially to younger students that maybe don't have the confidence or the fame or um so i want to talk a little bit about the book and sort of how this book came about can you tell us a little bit of background we're talking about this book yes we are we make photographs yes well chris our moderator has he founded the masters of photography online course three or four years ago now because he knew that it was the right moment that photography had penetrated the society everyone with a phone i mean i don't know do they have a camera with a phone or do they have a phone with a camera but whatever it is you no longer have to have two things it's there and it's made a generation of new visionaries who are willing to look at the world every day so you know everyone is a photographer now and chris understood that those who take it a little more seriously who get hooked might want to up their game so i'm sort of a tennis pro here or a golf pro or whatever a photo bro who um was the first person that he asked to uh to be part of the masters of photography and together we made a course that runs five and a half hours long with 35 lessons in it and this book is a condensation of 20 of those lessons we've taken the transcript basically because we wanted the lessons to be just like i'm speaking to you all right now you wanted this kind of direct face-to-face intimacy in a book form so that when you read the book it addresses you directly and and i i think there's nothing greater than intimacy in terms of connecting when you're sharing the methods and discoveries that you've made and to be honest i don't keep anything back i don't i've never believed that there are secrets in photography so i always for you just give it away just give everything that you know away as an act of generosity just like cartier-brasson did with us in those few moments and each person will take from it what they can and they will reinvent it for themselves just like i reinvented what i learned from the books that i looked at you know and i have to say in in the 60s there weren't the abundance of books that we have today there were three books robert frank's the americans cartier-bresson's decisive moment and walker evans american photographs it wasn't anything else and so those three books had enough in them to encourage me and my generation of photographers to believe in photography's capacity to describe the external world and the internal experience that each of us has as photographers and so i hope this book offers that kind of continuity with the past i mean i am of another generation but i live and work in the present and so i'm always trying to extend what it is i learned from then and apply it to the moment we're in now i want to be both the contemporary photographer and an old pro well we're very grateful that you did the book and we're going to show a clip here of the masters of photography class this is 57th and 5th in new york city if i hang on this corner for a while i'm going to see something people are coming this way and that way and there's all kinds of interesting things so you hang out on a corner and the boredom that you feel goes away just goes away because you're watching interesting things happen or you're just watching ordinary things happen but something out of the ordinary just comes along and suddenly you see it look at that [Music] oh oh got him in the air got him got him in the air let's see let's see there he is he's just ready to take off you pay attention to the next thing that calls your attention it's like it could be down there it could be something in the sky just stay connected to what's around you and you'll be nourished again and again okay so here we're just going to talk about a few of the images that are included in the book um so joel i first want to talk about your approach as a street photographer and um how your senses really play into photography um how do you figure out the locations of where you're going to shoot what draws you to these locations is it simply seeing a group of people and you're interested in them or or how do you how do you kind of post up and decide okay this is a great spot yes well you know everywhere you are has the possibility of offering you a surprise but to be honest when i would meet with gary in the mornings we would walk down through central park we'd cut through the zoo gary at that time was working on his book called the animals and then we'd pop out of the park at 59th and 5th avenue and fifth avenue was the boulevard of our dreams it's it's so dense it offers the high and the low there are messengers and there are business moguls you know there are models and there are bombs there are you know ordinary workers and there are the office moths we used to call them and so life was rich and going up and down fifth avenue trying to stay on the sunny side of the street particularly for me because i was shooting kodachrome and kodachrome loves hard sunlight um we would just walk and talk and shoot together we sometimes we hit on the same thing most of the times we hit on other things but there was such you know what it's like i'm not a fisherman but fishermen have told me that you know if you stand in the stream long enough and you watch you'll begin to see the trout you know make a move and everything and then you learn how to throw the line cast the line so that it lands in a tempting way and the trout will bite for it so if you're in the stream of fifth avenue you're a fisherman and you're watching what life is offering you and i think the the the most interesting aspect of street photography is that one learns over time to read the open-ended text of the street so you're on the street and there are 12 people abreast and they are hundreds deep and you're looking at who's coming up the street towards you while you're looking at who's near you and you're watching this play this flow of energy on the street and sometimes you say oh here comes a woman carrying two little dogs in her arms and here's a messenger on a bike weaving his way through the traffic the the people on the street and there's a guy over there playing the violin or balancing or juggling or something and so you you learn to see that if i move just a little to my right and i move a little quickly i'll be in the space of the woman with the dogs and the juggler and the guy on the bike so in a in a sense you don't create the thing but you open up the possibility of being in the right place at the right time that is the secret we've learned from looking at cartier-bresson and isn't that what you say when you look across your breasts on again and again you say he's always in the right place at the right time how do you how did he know well you know by learning to anticipate the things that interest you and you go to streets where there's enough of a change over so that you're not bored and bored isn't a bad state of mind sometimes if you are bored just stand still on a corner on any busy corner in any street you won't be bored for more than a few seconds as as as is proven if you look at the the videos and masters of photography you'll see me on 57th street and fifth avenue photographing the whole of it the stuff that comes out of the ordinary everyday moment is so surprising that within an hour or two of our filming we had dozens of potentially interesting photographs some of which appear in the book and in the book you you talk about portraiture um and we're going to show an image of the the famous image of the man leading out of the car um and i want to talk a little bit about how you you say that portraiture requires this connection of course most of the people that you are photographing are strangers so can you tell us a little bit more about how what you mean by that forming that connection thanks it's so important it's a very subtle connection you know on the street generally when i'm photographing on the street i don't want to make that connection i want to be invisible and slide by people and pick up a picture of them in relation to other things but periodically you're confronted in an interesting way with a single person and you either make eye contact or you have an understanding that you'll be able to play together for a split second or in the case of this photograph of the guy in the car this was during a one of those parades i mentioned earlier it was the puerto rican day parade and this guy was in his hot wheels you know he had made this thing and he was just leaning on the edge like that and i was in the street photographer and i turned around and i saw him and he was such a perfect epitome of you know that was the time of um like west side story this guy had a huge pompadour well oiled and he was obviously showing himself off in his wheels so that he could attract all the girls that he could and he was just the way he was leaning was so simple and elegant and present that i just sort of like floated in front of him and just made the picture and it was clear to both of us that he was willing to be there as he was because he thought of himself as a real dude and and that the fact that i recognized him made our a little compact clear with each other and then after that we had a couple of words we had a laugh you know and like i i moved on so i feel and many people have asked me over the years well how do you how do you do that without somebody bopping you in the nose or something and i say to everybody if if your open-heartedness is on your being it's on your face if what you're doing is enjoyable to you and you're smiling because it makes you it makes you happy photographing makes me happy and when i'm engaged in the moment i sort of light up and i think other people get the signal from you that you're not a problem you're not dangerous you're not going to steal their soul in some way you're going to you're welcome in that regard and but if you're working with a telephoto lens and far away and you're doing this with the lens and you're uncertain people are going to get annoyed they're going to think ah what's this guy doing and they're going to want to push back at you so i i think the secret to this kind of street portraiture is to stay accessible and open-hearted and and love for that moment the object of your desire and you will have you'll have the key to making the photograph and if you have to talk to them you you'll see in in the masters of photography online there was a couple of guys on a corner who were really dressed fantastically you know just for an outing on the day and and they were so astonishing that i was drawn to them and i felt it was important for the video to actually have a few words with them to show people watching that it's okay to talk to people too if you want to and and i just said something you know about the way he was dressed and he was immediately uh oh you know you're so happy that i was i acknowledged his their efforts that the door was open immediately so i i was suggesting you can do this too all of you it's not a it's not a hard thing to do and have people ever approached you on the street and said you know i see you have a camera here can you take my photo do you do you engage in that well it's not an everyday thing because i am quick and i tend to disappear but there are times that people have watched me you know from the side and then made an effort to come over and say you know we're in town here and everything and would you take a picture could you send it to us i'm not that kind of photographer but you know you're kind of interesting i'll do a portion of you and it was a way to actually break the the boundaries of street photography and have an engagement i mean i love people part of the joy of this game is to be out in the world with people and then meeting people so um sure sure it happens sometimes we're gonna go to image three um in the book you talk about this concept of awareness um being a prerequisite as a photographer um this it seems like you're you're talking about being sort of an active observer um how do you how do you balance this with you know you talked a little bit about this just now but how do you how do you balance this with wanting to take a photograph maybe it's not appropriate maybe you see something interesting how do you kind of negotiate that you know this is a it's so personal really for for everybody and i'll share my my my thoughts on this i what i've learned from photography over all these years is that you have to pay attention to where you are in order to be able to see the possible photographs that are hidden in in plain sight things are going on all the time and they're not necessarily saying hi i'm a photograph you make the reason i said make how to make photographs is i don't necessarily take pictures i put things together i move the frame around so that i can make two things that don't belong together in to the frame and therefore i make a new relationship that requires a kind of appetite but it also requires consciousness and consciousness is the state of mind one hopes to aspire to in one's life to be conscious of where you are and who you are as you develop and so photography has basically taught me that so i uh when i go out on the street i'm not sort of looking at my phone and walking i'm not distracted i'm looking at everything i'm hungry for it it says it's like my oxygen on the street because i want to stay delighted by all of these unexpected combinations that are coming to me so when i see something like that guy carrying the poodle you know i was in my volkswagen bus cruising down uh columbus amsterdam avenue and i see the guy on the sidewalk carrying his poodle and i i just sort of you know i'm driving the bus and i sort of reach out the window and i can click you know click seem try not to crash into anything click you know and um i'm shooting from a moving car basically but i didn't let that stop me because it's a limitation i thought well this is where i am i'll make the picture from here and i'll get in the photograph the lamppost the signs on the store behind him the picture becomes a combination of things rather than just object objectified man with poodle but you know i saw the joke of it it's like why should he walk if i can carry him like an old jewish joke you know so so in a way my my new york my new york ease part of me sees the joke and tries to make a picture of the joke and and not let it get away just because i'm in the car so that's part of the spontaneity that's possible with photography the the image you witness the image right out right out in front of you whether it out this car window or in front of you there and you respond by saying yes to it i've i always say and it's such a simple thing that every time you press the button on the camera you're saying yes to life and every yes is a very positive uh way of collecting your thoughts yeah i'll take that thank you very much for the world yeah oh that's a nice one i'll take that too and then when you collect a roll full of yeses oh it's today a card full of yeses you go and you look at them on screen and you think oh that is me that's less me that's less interesting oh that one speaks to me you begin to see that the line of yeses you've made over time begin to show a picture of who you are and i think that really what we were trying to do in the masters of photography was to help young artists young photographers find their identity because at the heart of it that's what photography is all about the reason you can look at a photograph and know that it's a cartier-bresson instantly doesn't have to say it on the bottom it's because his identity is in every single photograph and the same is true of winogrand of diane arbus of lizette mordell of eugene ache no matter who you look at the great photographers their characteristics are present in the photograph their identity is there and that's at the heart of our masters of photography online course is trying to help people to recognize the aspects of living that will help you harmonize with your identity sort of bring them into focus together does that make sense it does yeah it really does i want to talk a little bit about of course what's going on in the world right now um the code pandemic has impacted tens of thousands of people if not millions at this point um social distancing is going to become a new normal especially here in new york um how do you think this is going to change the trajectory of street photography you know we're not going to have as many crowds maybe on the street as before parades things like that that you're very familiar with could be something we're not going to be seeing for a very long time um people won't be hugging on the street really or kissing or even handshakes so how do we how do we manage this and how is this affecting your practice and how you're making your photographs now well let me jump over my my practice at the moment to address this you know it may be that we'll have a sense of a city that's more spacious and the individuals will stand out a little more from the crowd so i would imagine excuse me younger photographers who are out there now um finding a different distance to work with seeing the whole of the space rather than that kind of punchy in tight engagement with people who are jammed together and trying to move past each other you know in the in the uh in the intensity of an urban street um i i had i been in new york i think the thing that would have excited me over the last two and a half months would have been to go out every day to the empty photograph every empty street in new york because there will probably never be another time unless the pandemic happens again [Music] where one could photograph every street in new york empty what a record that would have been i would have done it with an eight by ten inch view camera so that we would have a haunting sense of the city as depopulated as if a neutron bomb had gone off and only left the buildings and not the people i don't know if anybody's done that i would hope that someone has had the vision to go forward and do that but you know there will be photographers out there and people will come back to the streets but the dance on the street will be different and i that's up to the younger photographers that's not going to be my time i'm i'm in the vulnerable class of the elders at 82 i'm you know i'm physically okay but i do have some leftovers from ground zero i have some lung issues even though i wore a mask in there the toxins in the air for nine months have made me susceptible more readily to mold or bacteria or you know pollen things i was never uh vulnerable to so i'm not going to be photographing on the streets so much and how that's affected me personally is that on january 1st i asked my before the pandemic i asked myself what are you going to do this year that you haven't done before and i realized that i had never made self-portraits i'm not talking about selfies i don't do that either but i had never really made a body of work about self-portraits and because the selfie is so powerful in our consciousness now i thought i'm going to see if i can make a portrait every day and see what the issues are that come up in self-portraiture because you know ego definitely is a big one right everybody wants to look really good for the camera best smile and so i wanted to see could i make photographs in a way that would challenge this notion and the wonder of this leica is that it has a 12 second timer on it which means i can set the camera up anywhere make a frame i can press the button and then i can just go live in the frame i can do anything i can flip an omelette i can you know you know get dressed i can hug my wife i i can do some results whatever but whatever i'm doing the camera is going to take a picture of me as if it was my hired gun who was doing a year-long story about joel myrons and so right now i'm 120 two days in i've got about 900 photographs and they are so crazy some of them are so ridiculous i've seen a few of these you you haven't published them yet but there's a few online is that right yes my we posted some on instagram and then artsy did a little piece and someone else did a little oh oh t magazine did a little piece so you know people ask what you're doing that's what i'm doing so it gets out there and i i don't know what the end result will be but i i have a book title and i have two publishers interested so the book title is playing with myself i love that i love that and i encourage everyone to take a look online if you haven't seen joel's newest work um my final question for today is to talk about you know this this giving encouragement and confidence to younger photographers do you ever encourage students to break photographic conventions has you know when you were young did anybody give you permission to break the rules and is that a way of encouraging young photographers you don't have to be so like in your box you know kind of you're you're you're so right on i mean too many schools or too many teachers in schools come up with a set of guidelines or rules and i think they have no right to tamp down any photographer's wide-eyed open-ended self-discovery you know the rule of thirds or you have to put this in the center i mean how ridiculous is that in fact we talk in the book we talk about quote composition and basically i say there are there are no rules an interesting frame is what you have to make interesting to you and interesting to look at and if that means shoving something over to the sides you can stick something else in on the other side that's what you do and and uh i certainly encourage photographers you know when i have workshops and even in in this workshop uh masters of photography and the book so often i i tried to um demystify i want to demystify the idea that there are rules in photography because each of us is capable of making a work of art all you have to do is find out who you are and what appeals to you and you will discover yourself and and the case in point is remember i mentioned before that i'm writing an essay for melissa o'shaughnessy melissa shauna sees a woman maybe near 50 right now and she took a course with me 10 years ago in in california and palm springs workshop and missy was photographing in the woods walks in the woods and nature and plants and flowers and things they were lovely they were lovely but she had never made a street photograph before and she took this workshop and palm springs isn't exactly a great busy town with a big street you know sort of retirement community but nonetheless we did some workshops on the street and she caught the bug in that way and here it is 10 years later and she's got a body of work that ranks right up there with street serious street photographers and this book which will come out probably in the fall is a very tough book on a lot of the good streets in new york fifth avenue chinatown wall street the lower east side union square she goes everywhere and she's not a native new yorker but it shows that within a 10-year period someone went from not dealing with the street at all to being on fire and making pictures that are deserving of being seen together recording this time and what's really interesting is that all of this work is right up to just before the pandemic so in a way it's the end of life as we knew it in the 21st century and everything from this book on will be a new reality so she exemplifies the the fact that a you don't have to be a guy to be on the street you can be as tough and street smart and witty and wide-eyed you know we're all equal in this and that you can accumulate work in a relatively short amount of time that has meaningful resonance in it and will describe history well thank you so much joel we really appreciate you sharing all that with us um and i do want to mention that we are excited for the upcoming masters of photography book series that's going to be continuing with albert watson who is also a photographisca alum um and that's published by lawrence king so i want to of course send my greatest gratitude to joel meyerowitz for doing this to thank lawrence king publishing and chris from the masters of photography we encourage you all to check out the photo sessions on photography new york's website and we can't wait to welcome you all back through the doors of photography eastern new york very soon thank you thank you amanda it was really a lot of fun speaking with you thanks so much thank you really appreciate it your stories are amazing so i think everybody's gonna love this great

Channel: Fotografiska New York

Views: 15,838

Rating: 4.9860625 out of 5

Keywords: Fotografiska New York, Fotografiska, Museum, Photography, Museum Photography, Photography at home, Joel Meyerowitz

Id: YgphDGViVYs

Length: 59min 9sec (3549 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020