Aperture Conversations: Joel Meyerowitz on 58 Years of Making Photographs

hi everybody i'm joel morrowitz thanks for being here i wish i could see you but you stuck with me aperture has invited me to talk about my work and how it and i have changed in the 58 years that i've been making photographs but before i begin i want to say how happy i am to be working with aperture again as we offer these three small prints for a benefit sale which is in support of apertures not-for-profit programming educational public and online efforts of theirs and at the same time my studio is scanning 140 000 kodachrome slides from my early years so this benefit supports both of us but in addition as i look at the challenges our society faces today i would like a portion of the proceeds from my studio to go to benefit the equal justice initiative they're doing incredibly necessary work supporting racial and economic initiatives to work against the injustices that we see in our society today so thank you for all of your help and i want to talk about some things that i hope will be challenging and surprising and stimulating for you i began making photographs in 1962. i was 24 years old i had been working as an art director in a small agency in new york and i was assigned to watch robert frank make some photographs for a little booklet that i designed and watching him was so astonishing that it changed my life i had one of those epiphanies that just made me think that photography which i knew nothing about could actually satisfy some unspoken desires that i was searching for as the painter because i was i was a painter at that point in my life an abstract expressionist painter second generation or or more and and suddenly there i was watching him work and then going out on the street and seeing life every day ordinary meaningless life filled with possibility uh emotions and and incidental happenings that sort of thrilled me for their simplicity and yet the kind of meaning they carried and i think in in some way it went in deep and i thought that the camera would be the perfect tool for snatching these moments that are sliding by us all the time out of obscurity into a kind of heartfelt collection of my own because really why do we make photographs any of us it's not to satisfy some external need is to satisfy something that we feel pulsing within us the kind of humanity that we experience around us the beauty of nature the quality of light the timing of things that appear and disappear in a fraction of a second and only the camera can tear out of the moving hall of life this fraction of a second that has some kind of meaning and you know meaning belongs to each and every one of us our values the way we grew up the books that we read the thoughts that we've brought into our our being our consciousness the people we've met who have influenced us all of this somehow aligns itself within us to determine something called meaning i've never i've never talked about this before but i i just felt that for today it was an important thing for me to try and express i mean yesterday when i i mentioned to my wife i'm i'm speaking to you from tuscany where we've been writing out the pandemic in what seems like a kind of paradise there are no cases here in our little community and and the italians suffered greatly at the very beginning but they did a remarkable thing with their society as a whole anyway we're sitting last night and talking about this and i said i wanted to talk about meaning but what what kind of meaning you know we're not talking about big philosophical meanings i'm talking about how throughout the course of the 58 years that i've been making photographs i've seen things that came into my consciousness quickly there was no time to think about them to process them the camera is such an instantaneous instrument and so i think i've gone through my entire life collecting these bits and pieces of time that at their moment of happening they seem to say to me this is essential beauty or this is essential generosity or this is the sign of love or this is a you know symbolic of relationships or of tragedy or of humor it's as if all of the possible human condition can be photographed if you are opening yourself to seeing this in the world around you and and that's the that's really been the joy of my life on the streets wherever i wherever i've been is watching the way other human beings conduct themselves but that's part of the game of seeing and it's part of the beauty of photography is that we as human beings have such an extraordinary perceptual intelligence that we recognize the potential meaning of things in instantaneous fragments and by reaching for them with a camera and bringing them in for future study one's life is expanded in that way because that 250th of a second that i see on fifth avenue or on the streets of siena or on the boulevard in paris when i take that home and make a print and then look at that print i i i feel that's kind of an indwelling moment where i enter the photographic space which is very different than the three-dimensional reality that we walk around it photography is two dimensions it's like closing one eye and looking at the world like a cyclops you know seeing it flat and and seeing meaning and the interconnectedness of it distributed all over the frame because after all the world is going around in 360 degrees in every arc but with a camera you're only getting 70 degrees more or less depending on the lens you use and that 70 degrees has to be packed with the kind of intuition that generates one's response to reach forward with the camera and make a photograph what made me do that what inner instincts compelled me to look then and to see something of note and i never really understand it in the moment in a way it's about sheer trust that whatever my attention is turned to must be something that goes deep in me to connect to some sense of value that i have and so really the lifetime of making photographs has served to explain to me the way the world looks how it works how it conveys the things that are meaningful and important to me it's almost impossible to lay them out beforehand and say oh today i want to photograph you know true love or i want to photograph generosity it's hard to identify these things when you put on your jacket and stick a camera on your shoulder you go out to be in the world to be at play in the world because really it is a lot about staying so open that the playful aspects of the way the world works are part of the deeper communication i mean these are the part of the mystery of photography that we don't often talk about we talk about the physical appearance of photographs the composition the you know the framing the shaping the moment but really there are deeper more meaningful powerful indications that are at play and by spending my life doing this i've i've learned really everything that i know about the world and about myself through the agency of making photographs and then sitting with them afterwards sitting with a real print in my hand because there's nothing like a print i mean nowadays we put everything on lightroom or have it on the screen and it remains intangible in a way but making the tangible print and holding it in your hand and flipping through 50 or 60 or 100 prints is a way to connect with the physicality of the world and the spirit that one goes out into the world with in search of the sublime the meaningful the nearly invisible that we hold on to so that's what this uh event is going to be about what i'd like to do now is to introduce you to chris ryan who is the founder and director of masters of photography online and three or four years ago chris came to me to ask me to be the first photographer in this online program and it's been an incredible journey that we've had together and chris will act as the sort of playmate here with me so that we could talk about some issues and later on answer some questions that some of you have sent into aperture for this talk today so stick around and chris is going to come on in just a moment hi joel it's great to see you thank you so much um for inviting me to um be here with you and i only wish that i was in tuscany in that lovely warm sunshine out there it looks just tremendous yes it's it's uh it's great for the spirit and it's such a safe place chris i i wish you were here too and i know you will be by the end of the summer yes i hope so and i hope to uh sit with you in your garden perhaps and continue our conversations it would be wonderful looking forward to it okay so joel um i'd like i'd like to talk to you about some of the important turning points in your work and perhaps also about how these three photographs in the aperture offer fit into that journey as well um you've already mentioned earlier at the first turning point which was working with the fantastic robert frank and seeing him at work which ignited you know your passion for photography but is it fair to say that um the second turning point for you was during sort of 1963 to 1964. and that was actually a combination of things it was about seeing print and also deciding to shoot in black and white could you tell us a little bit about that period please yes well you know it has to start just a little bit before that to get in there of course my first turning point was giving up the job that i had and the idea of being an artist you know a graphic visual artist to becoming a photographer and i started working in color immediately and and for that first year shooting in color you know it it was virtual it wasn't a tangible thing these were projected images on the screen and my friend at the time tony ray jones a great english photographer who died way too soon at 30. he and i looked at slides every single night projected on the wall about two feet across so that we could really see the information in there and and our commitment to color you know began right then but after about a year i realized that you know when i would show these pictures to our friends they would just sit there and look at the screen you know a couple of feet away and it was as if they were in the movies they never got up to get close to look at the picture itself and i realized i need to see a print and that was brought home to me very clearly by gary winogrand who by that time had become my daily buddy we would meet every morning at a greasy spoon on 96th street and columbus avenue a couple of blocks from his house and mine and we we'd have a terrible cup of coffee and a danish and then we do a bagel and then off we go walking down through central park out to the zoo he was doing a series on the zoo and then we get to fifth avenue and we spend the day going up and down fifth avenue but you know one night when i was at at the end of the shooting day we were back home and gary handed me a block of prince to look at black and white prince like two or three hundred prints in this chunk and i remember flipping through them and having that sensation in my gut of uh oh you know this is a tangible thing this is a photograph and and i could flip through them and then flip back so i could see the connections and the and the continuity and the ideas that were sort of stretched out through the photographs and you couldn't quite do that with the virtual image on the screen and i thought oh i have to start printing but at that time it was nearly impossible to print color in your own torque i didn't even have a dark room because i didn't need it i was shooting color so it just came to me that i had to begin to make prints and by by making prints i had to shoot black and white so there was this jump from seeing the world in color to trying to learn how to understand what things meant in black and white and it was an incredible learning experience and i felt in in some ways i had gone back in time to connect to the whole history of photography that had been in black and white so that was a real big learning experience but you know i didn't give up color i kept on shooting color along side of the black and white just just because it had become my first vocabulary and and basically and and that first transformation from color to black and white there were moments when i when i finally had a second camera because basically i only had one camera so i could only work in one you know medium but by then i had two cameras and i could load the second camera with color and here and there i made some comparison prince if if the action was slow enough that i could actually get the second camera up and make two pictures of nearly the same thing i could then look at them and see why color because it became an argument even as early as 1963 64 people were saying well you don't want colors for amateurs colors for commerce colors for magazine work you know it kind of put it down and i wanted to lift it up so that was really uh an important turning point for me isn't it funny that um that recognition of the image not having the same power on a screen as the tactile nature of a print is also what we sort of feel about photographs today is it not true we see them on a screen and we're like okay but where is that where is that magical tactile two-dimensional textural thing the print so it actually that screen print the screen looking the images on the screen is also the same as looking at images on the screen today not the same experience for you correct no it's it's right and you know both of us i mean you're a photographer and you you treasure the print you've been making prints all your life yes um we're used to that kind of hands-on world i think a lot of photographers today are used to just dumping their digital you know chip into the computer and then seeing their pictures on screen and you know a full screen monitor 20 inches or something like that you know it looks good enough it looks big enough but it's not the same as making a print and and i know we both feel strongly about that and we talked about it in masters of photography we do pick a print if you really want to know what your work does to people joel if we could move on to the perhaps the third turning point which was during 1966 to 67 when you went to europe for a year shooting equal numbers of color and black and white rolls of film and you also began shooting from the car and the drive-by shootings and you also had your show at mama i mean what a year can you tell us a little bit about what this period developed for you it was one of those incredibly important years of my life i i think in the course of that year i discovered something about being a man you know not a young guy yeah but being a serious artist and being you know being on one's own because for the years before i left for europe in 66 i saw gary every day and and and early in 66 i met todd pappa george and the three of us were on the street and you know when you're a trio on the street you do things as a group but if you're away like in europe i was on my own i was married my wife was there with me but you know our lives were were different she was studying the guitar and working in a pottery and i was out on the street all the time and and and really um to be one's own man and to make the day uh so enriching and so fulfilling through photography meant that every every single day i was out in the world on my own trying to make sense of you know who i am what photography is to me what is a value to photograph the ideas and and the experiences were unifying in some way and i could feel the seed in me you know off my own seed kind of sprouting and opening up and and europe was so foreign and so fascinating and and you know when you can't speak another language like when i went to england i couldn't speak the queen's english i brought my new york ease with me you know what i mean there's not many british people can speak the queen's english either actually i still can't understand you we need subtitles we need subtitles we have to put titles so so learning learning what was uh the first layer of visibility whether you're in england or in paris or in spain it comes at one almost like being a tourist and then if you're there long enough these touristic things begin to subside and the artist begins to get on the wavelength of the culture you can start start to dig beneath because you know there's something beneath what is there for the tourists to see and and so i wanted to be in each place long enough to begin to sink into the rhythms and the the sort of the vernacular of each of these countries and really england was a great uh starting point for me because i did speak the language and and i did have tony ray jones there to hang out with for a while and i traveled all over england and ireland and wales and scotland so i i had a variety of the landscape and the behavior of different the different peoples in great britain and then after that i i left for france and and in fact one of the photographs in the sale is made in paris it's a couple with a motorbike and they're dressed in purple and the crazy thing is that i was in paris for probably 10 weeks all told over the time over that year and i would see those people really almost every other day they would appear in a park or driving along on the left bank or i'd find them by the yards to triumph they were crazy i was there and they seemed to be popping up and this one day walking through the wad balloon and there they are parking their bike in in matching purple outfits and i i grabbed that photograph and i've never really filmed it and i just felt it would be so tasty to show this early you know observation as one of these sail prints but but you know that whole year as as you mentioned you know shooting two cameras black and white and color and shooting about the same somewhere around 300 and something 350 rolls of each in the course of a year that's a lot that's a lot of shooting that's a lot of shooting a lot of uh and really when i came back i was uh a big chunk of the work was shot out of a moving car you know when you're driving for a year you're sitting in a car i always carry the camera in my lap and sometimes you see something out the window and you know if you stop the car to go and get what you saw it won't be there because the moment is the rising moment yeah it's a gesture of somebody combing her hair in a doorway it's two people kissing alongside of the road it's someone carrying loaves of bread on his head you know and you just see this thing and so i began shooting out of the car while i was driving and when i got back to new york and i printed up more than a thousand of those pictures and everything else i showed them to john tcharkovsky at the museum of modern art and it was it was like that he just said oh this is a this is an exhibition we got to do this this is so photographic that you would be in a car at 60 miles an hour and you're making photographs of things that are disappearing is pure photography yeah and so there i was you know 29 years old just back from europe and i'm being offered an exhibition at the museum of modern art this is this is huge absolutely huge period that's great joel thank you could you talk a little bit about what we might describe as the fourth turning point which happened during 1974 to 76 period when you adopted some really big changes in your work firstly you decided to only shoot in color and you combine that with what you describe as giving up incident and making overall field photographs can you tell us a little bit about that please yeah it was an important time in my life i had just finished the guggenheim grant grand tour of america you know my generation sort of followed in the footsteps of robert frank and uh it was now sort of 20 years after frank and america was changing and the vietnam war was on and i i made a number of trips around the country photographing and then and always in color and black and white side by side but at a certain point i found myself feeling as if i was a visual athlete and that my game was you know well understood by me and i was making interesting satisfying photographs maybe good photographs but you know i i was i i was capable of doing them like i found myself thinking is this it is this all there is am i going to plateau and continue to do the same kinds of pictures that are based upon a gesture a kiss an incident some something happening that is located sort of toward the middle of the frame and at the same time i was feeling like i had said what i wanted to say in black and white and really i wanted my commitment to be totally in color i i no longer wanted to divide myself this way and so i i i said if i'm going to try to give up the incident which is has been the center of the the photograph since cartier-bresson we could say almost all photographers hook the picture on something that's happening so i was thinking color describes things so well the deep space of the new york city street the sky the flags flying the trees the buses the people on the street the shine and the buildings the windows i mean all of that is content and photography is about describing what's in front of the camera that's your content and i thought well color describes more content than black and white because the shapes are in color and they pulse in a different way and i thought if i need to get the entire depth of field of the street with color film which was so much slower than black and white that you couldn't always get the entire range of the street i would have to step back from the normal seven or eight feet that i worked at because you know truly gary and todd and i and probably reedland or two when you're photographing the street it's sort of a plane and the plane is the people who are about eight to ten feet away so you enter that plane and across the field is the information that you're interested in and that makes the shape of your frame but if i had to step back 15 feet so in order to get a deeper space then the dynamics of the picture the uh the incident that would hook the picture would be further away and it would it would sort of lack the kind of guts that it used to have for me but i took that on i was willing to make failed photographs in color by stepping back so that i could then see all over the frame and make the content everything in the frame the buildings the sky the quality of the day the feeling of the seasons the the hour that i'm shooting at the the color of the sidewalks the way things are reflect i mean i wanted it all and and i remember when i started showing some of these experimental further back pictures to my close friends other street photographers they kind of looked at me like you've lost your touch you know where is where is that little that little gem in the middle and i would have to say no i haven't lost it i'm giving it up i don't want to be working in that met with that method any longer i want to see if i can make photography over if i could make street photography into something more dynamic by using the entire field of the image as having content because when you look at a picture today let's say if you were to look at pictures from the 19th century one tends to look all over the picture to see how interesting that time was there's there's information everywhere look at the guy on the camel in the background and there's the pyramids and look there's some people climbing the pyramid and up here are three people's you know carrying water jugs and by by by seeing all that information we we get a chance to look at the 19th century and so i was thinking that if i stepped back on fifth avenue and i gave you the full field of fifth avenue with all that information in there some person 50 years from then which is almost now could look at that and really get a sense of what the texture of new york was like what street life was like how people behave so the content wouldn't be dependent upon the incident that told some kind of momentary story the content would be more dynamic and and more challenging and more demanding but but color for me engaged that idea with me and so it was worth sacrificing giving up the thing i thought i knew how to do well for something that would be interesting and engaging to me for whatever the future and what happened was that at a certain point i realized 35 millimeter even though it was really deliciously sharp couldn't handle the amount of information in a large print because i was thinking of prints that would be five or six feet across this is in the 70s when no one was printing large i wanted these big prints that allowed the viewer to really enter the frame and that's when i had this idea you know what i need to buy a large format camera which is the next turning point in my life because as a street photographer i used to look at ansel adams and the f64 group as those old guys out in the west with their view cameras taking pictures of rocks and shells and mountains and trees these static objects and as a street photographer you know the view camera the 10 8 doesn't serve the purpose but i thought you know what i need the description more than anything else i'm going to find that camera and i'm going to just go and enter that space and see what comes of it and it was for me one of those gifts you know what it's like it's like learning another language yeah suddenly i was speaking eight by ten e's which is a that's not japanese or chinese eight by attendees is a whole new language of stillness and a kind of meditative indwelling where you look at something out there and it begins to like play on the shores of your mind and your emotions in a way that 35 millimeter jazz doesn't do it's almost like i switch from being a jazz musician making a riff on the street to somebody playing in an orchestra with a cello yeah i mean it's a very tactile camera is it not you sort of have to feel your way into a picture with a 108 and it's also a massive departure or 8x10 it's a massive departure for you because it's a static camera on a tripod but did you enjoy that feeling of maneuvering the lens and the back into shape with you know in your imagery i i did i really did at first i thought how am i going to learn this it's upside down i'm under a dark cloth the action you know is nothing is happening you know a breeze or a light movement or something very small but yet within the scope of the big camera it has a kind of grandeur to it so in a way i gave up the instantaneous momentary gesture and recognition the kind of immediacy of that poetry i gave it up for the longer poetics of static moment of of the space itself being palpable because the 8x10 describes it so well so i i feel like i just uh came to um um not exactly a closure with 35 millimeter because i continued it but i continued it in relation to the large format which meant that i had two two two different dimensional ways of looking at the world now slow and fast and those are essential dimensions of photography you know one is all about speed and the other is all about time but what you also did which um was very brave and also very difficult was you decided to photograph people with a 8x10 camera and people in my opinion react in totally different ways if you have a little tiny camera to a great big huge eight by ten pointed at you can you tell us a little bit about um that that aspect of photographing people with uh 8x10 well as a matter of fact aperture published the book of those people portraits eight by ten people portraits from provincetown just this past november and and i'm having a show in berlin in october of this year of that very same work and it really you know when i was photographing on the street i i never asked anybody's permission you know i made portraits but they were portraits on the fly i never had an interaction but when i carried the 8x10 camera around i became the observed fact people wanted to know what's with that big camera what's that wooden camera what are you doing you know i lost my invisibility yeah you know i had been cultivating for all those years and now i was totally visible so i turned it on itself and i would sometimes i would see someone who was so interesting that i needed to go over to them and say to them i need to make you a portrait and no one ever said no i think it was the ca you know it wasn't me the big camera must have been such a seduction people wanted to say oh yeah that's not the 19th century i'll i'll stand for that yeah and it requires a whole different you you know this all too well from the work that you've done it requires a different engagement and absolutely the slow time allows people to kind of settle into themselves and when i open the shutter it would be as if their mystery was the thing that i was looking for not their charm their superficial posture the kind of thing you'd get with a small camera celebrity pictures where everybody's doing their stuff with the view camera they have to come to rest in some way it's like it's like big game hunting you know you're standing there in front of some some creature that you've just you know arrested their movement by your presence and you just hope it doesn't pounce on you and chew your head off yeah yeah so i i you know i i was able to do that and i made several thousand portraits on cape cod of total strangers whose lives intersected with mine and who gave themselves to me they had to really wait it out until something came over them some kind of quietude some inner sense of self or the expression of their mystery and you know if you ask that question as a photographer to yourself can i photograph the mystery that creates the beauty that i see on this person because it's not just the physical beauty sometimes it's their inner mystery that comes a calling and the idea that you might be able to describe that that ephemeral changing shape-shifting thing by holding still long enough for someone to give that that's that's what it's all about and the camera the camera helps that because you know people are so used to the small cameras and this and the small snaps and the grabbing that when you're presented with that big camera that must have helped them actually look in a more different in a different way into your lens and then you just wait for that moment you you ask them to relax in front and then just wait for that moment correct and you only used to shoot one one frame i believe in in in the series i just did one i i wanted it to be almost as chancy as a 35 millimeter street picture in which the thing happens and it's gone so using that method from my past with a view camera in which i could put another sheet another sheet you know i could keep doing it but i didn't want to i wanted to see if i could make the moment happen because i understand what a moment is having learned it on the street and by the way i just wanted to mention something that the other two pictures that are in this aperture sale one of them came from that period in 1974 76 where i was trying to make a field photograph and that's the woman with the hat on the street corner oh yes that was for that era and the last picture which is the one of a corner in st louis which says brains on it which i i love this picture yeah that was made the view camera in 1976 when i first began going to st louis where i had a commission to photograph the city of st louis by the st louis art museum and i used the view camera and um and so these three pictures for sale come from these three different turning point periods in my life thank you joel so another big turning point for you in the mid 1990s was making a film of your father and with your father and your son called pop um could you tell us a little bit about your experience in moving into that genre please john well you know we all probably carry the secret desire to be filmmakers or movie makers at some point i think every photographer wants to add movement and sound and and music to to their work and i had always wanted to do that but i hadn't written the film that i wanted to make although i did try a few times i it hadn't it hadn't matured for me and then one day i was visiting my father in florida and my mother had you know sort of been hiding from us the fact that he was beginning to have dementia and he was beginning to get lost but she was covering it up from her three sons in new york like we shouldn't know that our father is going through a big life change so i was down there and we maggie my wife and my son sasha and i were out with my pop shopping and he and i were in the car waiting for them and at some point he turned to me and it was like a magical moment he said to me you know the trouble with me is i never get to the point where i get to the point and and he and he kind of looked at me and i realized in that in that instant that he's telling me that he's he can't get to something he can't get to his memories he can't there's something missing something's going on and because he couldn't say basically you know i'm losing my marbles and i'm getting lost he didn't say that but he let me know this other way in that moment i had one of those turning point moments where i it was an epiphany i thought oh i see there are so many people there are millions of families in america which alzheimer's was beginning to become the big issue of the time like the pandemic is now alzheimer's was like raging in the 90s suddenly it was news and i thought you know what i'm going to save up some money and i'm going to take him on a road trip with my son sasha so it'll be three generations from the same family and i want to see if i can take my pop from florida back to new york city make a road movie with him in which i will try to help him regain his memories and i will also get him out of a kind of assisted living care that he was in which was it was terrible i think these assisted living places were they were a nightmare you know the way they treated the people in there was just terrible i i wanted to do something about it and so i did i saved up some money i rented a big lincoln continental limo i i you know got some state-of-the-art video cameras real broadcast quality cameras and then uh sasha and i flew to florida and got in the car and we took a road trip of about four weeks back to new york city it's a trip that takes two days it took four weeks slow and easy and all the time we just talked to him and got him you know off his medications so that he was back out in the world and it was interesting to see that his spirit his his energy was still there it was very positive and he could engage with people and talk with people oh no no excuse me here is high's teeth he just couldn't remember that he but he had for breakfast or he couldn't remember what happened yesterday so his short-term memory was gone but his spirit his his um his persona was intact they gave it to me because uh i was the champ what weight were you fighting at 120 138 138 what class is that called lightweight lightweight let me see your stance how did you stand when you were that's the only way yeah let me see you throw a punch ah go down the diamond and they went down they went in and this movie which is sort of a a road movie comedy with the three of us together was so incredibly powerful for me and for sasha too that when we were over when it was back we were back in new york sasha turned to me and said you know pop i wish grandpa lived in canada we we could still be on a road go further it's a very touching and emotional movie and and it is beautiful um the relationship that you have with him and it is funny and tragic it has all the elements of a movie and you can see the movie on our site by the way if you go it's free on our site to watch the masters of photography site if you want to want to catch up with it um but joel what did it teach you in your still photography did it teach you anything for your still photography or how did it inform your still photography after you made that film what it taught me was that i was at a point in my life where i wanted to see if i could do more work that was um in the service of something and and what happened was in the in the years that followed that not necessarily immediately but soon enough 9 11 happened and i volunteered to go into ground zero and make the record the historical record of ground zero for the people of new york and and all americans who were interested and then following that i i did a body of work which aperture published called legacy which was about the new york city parks i i photographed the wilderness in all of the new york city parks and the parks hadn't been photographed since the depression during the depression the works progress administration had on its agenda the the um sort of gathering of the information of what all the parks in new york looked like they basically hired photographers to go around and do it to make work that so it was 70 years between record making so that's what that's really what changed for me thanks very much joe that was great um we have a a few questions that have come in from aperture and uh we have time for two or three to ask you so if you don't mind i don't know who this is from but thank you for sending it in um a question is what is the factor that separates a street photographer from a documentary photographer as you know people have asked me that any number of times and i i think it's it's very subtle really but i've never thought of myself as a documentary photographer except finally when i was in ground zero after the towers fell and i was making that record in a way i was trying to document everything going on in there but from my life up until that point which is about 50 years of working i just was doing it for myself i wasn't a photographer for hire by news magazine or newspaper or any storytelling place and i think that that when you work for yourself and you're out in the street you're trying to understand your time what are the characteristics of your own time how can you describe for yourself the way you feel in the period you are experiencing so it's very personal that way a documentary photographer usually has a goal he's going to try to describe the ganges river from point a to point b or he's going to do a story on the closing of some steel mills and he'll he'll be there documenting people the work may look like street photography catches catch can photography but it's really driven by the the storyline that is running through the pictures that that documentarian is trying to make something cohesive and coherent whereas the street photographer is incoherent because street life is chaos and the photographer feels good being in that chaos because the surprises are an enrichment so i think i i think that's the the way to divvy it up what else you got here ah okay so i think i can combine two questions now so the two questions are what advice would you give photographers facing doubts about themselves and their art and i'm going to combine that with another question from somebody else and thank you both for sending these in whoever is any advice for emerging artists joel well it's good to put them together they're they they're two sides of a coin in a way um you could say two sides of a chip you know everybody has doubts at some point what am i doing is this worth anything you know are these pictures any good i mean these questions come up again and again not for me of course but for all of you i don't know i think it comes up for yeah it comes up for us all the time that's true i i say you have to work your way through it you don't you don't let doubt you know burn you out or or hold you back um i used to feel when i was very young first starting there surely would be days where i thought uh i have to go out you know you know gary wasn't around that day to go hang with let's say you know i don't feel like it and you know you can you can moan and groan to yourself but you know something as soon as you put the camera on your shoulder and you go out in the street ah life presents itself yeah and it shows you the unexpected and before you know it you're committed once again you're engaged and you find yourself um looking following you know a detail down the street or someone who is engaging to you or the way people are standing and talking so it it it's there waiting for you you just have to get out of the house and and go do it and you'll forget about any kind of negativity that that you have and and by the way both of these questions can be answered in a in a really interesting way if you were to be interested in taking the course that chris found masters of photography online and the course that i teach because i actually deal we both deal with those questions because we're trying to offer a young or or any age photographers who are beginning to take themselves seriously we're trying to say that there are steps that one can take very simple pragmatic steps to take that will bring you closer to your own identity and once you realize that that's what it's about your appetite will surge and you'll find that this is a way of it's a self-serving way of keeping yourself connected to photography to your ideas because remember photographs and i say this in the course so i can say it to you now photographs look like pictures but they're really about your ideas things that you think are important to you things that you observe about the world at large that you think are worthy of commenting on the photograph that you reach for the moment that comes alive for you because it connects to something in your head and you become inspired that's how you connect to your identity and bit by bit these identity points in your work create a body of work a through line that shows you again and again your particular way of looking at the world and after a while you'll show your friends your pictures and they'll say oh yeah that's you know jack's photograph because it looks like you it has your distance in it it has your tempo it has your sense of humor it has your thoughtfulness or your the gravity of your ideas whatever the hell it is it identifies you because you've been able to be consistent about it so you know you might want to look into masters of photography online and see if something is is good for you and i think i think we'll even show you a clip yeah a few minutes to uh to to show you what we're talking about 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 quick 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 well that's about it thank you so much joel it's been an absolute pleasure as always talking to you thank you so much for for coming on and and talking with us thank you chris thank you for being the moderator here and stepping in that way and thanks to aperture and everybody at aperture for wanting to have this event today um remember everybody the three print sale is going on in support of aperture and the scanning of 140 000 kodachrome slides in my studio and the support for the equality initiative that my studio will be supporting i hope you all enjoyed this thank you very much you

Channel: Aperture Foundation

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Id: uq_ZpTHgvNM

Length: 59min 17sec (3557 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020