#LeicaConversations - Joel Meyerowitz

hey everybody i'm hugh brownstone for three blind man and an elephant and i am so delighted that laika asked me to come back to guest host a very special very personal episode of their new series called like a conversations like his objective with this free series of conversations and live streams is to inspire our visual storytelling uh and connect with the larger community and i really like that so that's just another reason that i'm really glad to be here wow with this said i have a lot of notes i'm going to be referring to them often so forgive me um but today we're going to go behind the scenes of this year's 40th anniversary whoops oh i gave that away i wanted to hold that up for a second okay that's why i'm really excited put it up put it up this is why i'm really i'm really excited because i get to sit down and have a conversation i get to introduce to you a side of joel myrowitz who you may uh which you may not know i mean joel is a legendary photographer but he's also a writer and educator i think he's more than a little bit of a philosopher and a poet and as i've come to know him over the past couple of weeks he is a genuinely nice human being so in fact it was because joel is a juror at loba the leica oscar barnack awards if we can go forward a little bit so uh loba is a nomination only jury driven photo competition which they say recognizes and honors photographers who's i'm going to quote this here unerring powers of observation capture and express the relationship between man and the environment in the most graphic form because it's an annual event the way i think of it is that it is a competition to capture the zeitgeist so this is really really interesting to me now to do this to go behind the scenes we're going to speak with a juror and not just any juror it's joel the thing about this particular uh 40th anniversary event is that in breaking from past tradition each photographer was asked to submit between 15 and 20 images a body of work and as joel and i talk you're going to learn why that's so important but what i want to do really the the gold for me is to explore this particular juror's own origin story how he came to be who he is today how that journey has impacted not only his photography but how he sees and judges the works of others but our ambition is to go even deeper than that and joel has very graciously accepted the challenge while simultaneously keeping in me keeping me in suspense which is very tough because i've been waiting for weeks for his answer to a single question i posed to him not photographer to photographer but man to man so joel thank you for playing with me on that so i'm going to reintroduce you because it really is my honor and privilege to introduce someone who is recognized around the world as one of the most important street photographers of his generation one of the most important street photographers period a pioneering artist in the use of color a highly influential teacher and who i also think beyond being a wonderful writer poet philosopher educator he's a father he's a son he's a brother he's a husband and he's a friend and i i think we sometimes get so caught up in the label of photographer or gear that we miss that at the end this is all about humanity and the human behind the camera and the humans in front of the camera so joel again thank you hello well i uh and you know exactly why i'm so chuffed about this so um there was something that you said in your master class when you were about to review the work of one of your students and i want to quote you on this you said my intention is to look at the work and to see if i can find in the photographs qualities that describe to me as a stranger essential values that the artist brings to the work if i can find the identity of the human being who made the photographs in the photographs i have never seen a more economical way of expressing the notion of the artist's voice well what else are you looking at when you look at a photograph i mean it's a little self-contained story it's about a place or people and you look at it for its formal properties perhaps but behind it is the person who made it not just their eye but their life experience their sensitivity their risk taking characteristics you know so when i look at a body of work in particular i mean it's much harder with a single picture let's be honest it's a picture but when you look at a body of work as i did with the loba jury i'm trying to see besides the story the artist is telling who are they are they revealing anything to me about their most intimate qualities or are they just telling me a story because they're in you know russia and they're dealing with the radiation in chernobyl or they're in on some island in which you know the population is dying are they feeling something about this or is it just eyeballing it and i think too often photography slips into this way of describing the world where the artist becomes invisible the pictures are there but it's all about story and because i've never really been a true documentary photographer working to tell stories for hire i've always believed that reading photographs because every photograph has an indelible text built into the photograph and i want to see if i can find the text and within it find something of the humanity of the person who made it and when i look at the very best work over the history of photography 180 years of history i can see who aceh was or august saunder was or at least to me you know it's not that it's a perfect description of them but i get a sense of who that man was or who deanne arby's was in her curiosity and her relationship to people or how come bresson could make the kinds of pictures he made who was brazal and and it goes on and on with with every artist of any significance if you look deeply into the word you should find andre into the persona of that person and thus the work has an added dimension it has the human dimension rather than purely photographic pictorial dimension it's fantastic and interesting that you mention uh cartier-bresson and trying to understand who he is he has such an interesting background as those of you who know me uh you've heard this before apologies but i spent enough time going through his background to understand that he was actually born into one of the 200 wealthiest families in france at the time of the rise of the industrial revolution in particular uh textile mills and that affected how he saw the world and what opportunities he had to see the world so i i hear you i mean i'm vibrating but i was doing that the first time we met i want to share with you uh another uh quote i'm not gonna bother saying who said it but it wasn't you uh okay i say it the images we choose to see capture and cherish most are a function of the sum total of our life experiences up until the moment we trip the shutter now maybe it's because i read too many comic books uh or read too many as a kid or maybe i should have watched fewer marvel and dc comics movies but i really do tend to think of this as mining one's own origin story to find one's artistic voice which is what this is uh all about now you talked about loba and you talked about what you were looking for so i think there are two other things that come into play it's what it is about your life which lets you see these images the way you do but it's also about the nominators right because each of them is an individual with a life's worth of experience as well yeah well i mean let me say first that i i it was a privilege to be on the lobby jury because i had a chance to see 45 or 50 photographers maybe 15 of them i can't remember the number exactly are sort of new upcoming artists and the others were more established although i didn't really know them or their work so i did have a chance to at you know in one bolt uh see a lot of work and a lot of really good work the uh the fact of the selection a priori before it was my turn to eliminate from the final selection along with the other jurors the the overall selection chosen by leica you know people editors um felt to me to be sort of focused on a storytelling about the uh what's wrong with the world today i don't quite remember what the the um demand of this uh jurying was but it felt like it was all stories about the things that are really bad in the world today you know global warming the dying off of animal life you know the collapsing of cities the you know the continent falling away underneath our feet i mean it was a lot of bad news frankly and a lot of photographers rose up in the telling of this bad news i shouldn't say a lot some photographers rose up in the telling of this bad news and saw the the human failing of it and a lot of people i felt good photographers quick on their feet good eye you know good exposure being in the right place at the right time but it was as if the story was driving them so hard that a bit of their humanity slipped away whereas i i didn't feel often enough the tenderness as they witnessed the crap that they were looking at their i didn't feel their hearts opening i saw their eye open i saw the camera with the right lens but i that was a dimension that was missing to me and although the sum total of each photographer's work had a an engaging story in it i think there's more and i don't think it's wrong to demand more from this kind of work because when you look historically at the great stories that were done in the heyday of life magazine and look magazine and in the big picture magazines of the 50s and 60s before and after you do see some stories that are heartbreaking and the photographer was stunned by what he or she saw and and and at times rose up to the humor and and the irreverence of it and so i i was i was hoping to find a little more of that more than just competence and timeliness and and all the qualities that you know we revere in good documentary photography so i was a little on the fence with some of it and yet there were some really stirring stories there some that didn't win but that were nonetheless really telling i i mean things that pulled at me so you know it's always a mixed bag when you're looking at 50 plus photographers you're only going to give away a dozen awards or whatever it is it's you know it's a lot to cut away and to agree on i i i so get this i uh i shoot street you know what i do now and i've always said that i shoot street photography because in that moment of casual connection because most of the time i ask because it's that process that i enjoy so much it reaffirms for me that the world is not a uniformly terrible place and the headlines and the reality of where we are the zeitgeist of where we are really is kind of once in a hundred years uh proposition but i get completely when you talked about mid-century photographers i'm thinking of dorothea lange her she comes through in her photographs of the japanese internment camps in the united states her humanity comes through with that photograph of the migrant mother jean smith uh whether it's a day in the life of a country doctor or the the coal streaked faces of welsh miners their their humanity comes through so i really really get that but now i want to go to you i want to spend the rest of the time on you i want to really dig into your journey your origin story and guys the way that i proposed to do this is uh i'm going to share with you if you can only get two books if you can only get two books this is one of them it's where i find myself and this is uh this was published i think in 2017 joel is that right i think 2018 i think all right okay just i just got close enough i just got the latest uh printing of it it just came this morning it's the fifth printing and it's that you know like almost 20 000 copies sold so the book is doing its job well it it really is because it is a wonderful way to understand as much of joel's life as he's cared to share in print and it's actually quite a good deal so i i really i highly recommend that and in fact we're going to use that as natural progression uh to tell his story and his life but the one other book that i would recommend is this one cape light now joel i don't think when we spoke last time i told you that the claudia and i have been up to provincetown and we've cycled through provincetown and so just seeing these images really brought a bunch of things home to me but the reason why i'm recommending it to everyone else is because and we'll get into this uh shortly joel shot these images with an eight by ten inch deer dwarf camera on a six foot tripod that he carried around with him and there is something ineffable and sublime in these images that of all the books that i've seen from joel thus far is best captured here joel if you just want to say something about that book and then we'll circle back you bookended me with my first book in my last book nothing happened in the middle um just 30 other books i think anyway yeah that was a departure the cape-like book was a departure i i was at a point in my life where i had been photographing for 14 years at that point and i was going through a transition in the early 70s in which i was i started in color in 62 by 63 i started shooting black and white i shot black and white in color alternatively and together for those 14 years but by the mid 70s i decided no more black and white and i was trying to undo the things that i had learned because i think if you learn how to do something really well and you you're just good at it all the time or satisfying at it let's say for yourself that's the time to let it go because otherwise you're going to be tempted to plateau along that line of successfully made photographs again and again and so i wanted to challenge myself in ways to make a different kind of 35 millimeter street picture in which the the incident was no longer the center piece of the picture i don't just mean in the center of the frame but wherever you put it in the frame when you when you're moving that frame around on the street and so i wanted to give up the incident and work in color which meant i had to step back further away from the seven or eight feet that i usually worked at to more like 15 or 18 feet so that i could have the depth of field this isn't going to be technical don't worry but the depth of field said i could read the whole street because color is such a powerful descriptive tool i wanted everything in the field to be described so that i could release myself from hanging the picture on the hook of the incident there's a lot to give up you know when i show these pictures to gary with to todd pepper george they would look at me like what happened where's the picture you know and i'm saying no no you don't understand i'm giving that up i'm trying to make a new kind of picture i don't want to be the decisive moment street photographer in that mold any longer i want to see what else can i say anyway bit by bit i kept on feeling that the description of everything in the field even though kodachrome was beautiful it wasn't enough and i had heard john charkowski once say he was the head of museum of modern art for 30 years he's the guy who made photography what it is today he's the guy who brought it into the public eye so that we are where we are and john once said look all you do you know you press the button on the camera and it describes everything in front of the camera and i misread that as meaning oh description is everything so by trying to describe the whole field with 35 the pictures were interesting for sure and they're in that book but i at some point felt i wanted even greater description because i wanted to make bigger prints and in 1976 nobody was making prints bigger than 16 or 20 inches and so i got myself a view camera and i started to make pictures and immediately started making prints at 40 inches sometimes even bigger but 40 became like you know that's the size you want to you want a window i'll give you a window to look at the world and in order to learn how to use that camera uh i had to get out of the city for a summer and cape cod provincetown offered an interesting combination of a place that was really a peninsula surrounded by water on three sides with ponds in the middle and it had a really active street life very much like 8th street in greenwich village in new york city so there i had the dynamic of a street life and i had the landscape and the spaciousness of the cape it allowed me to try to figure out what i could do with this 8x10 camera so this book in a sense is my learning tree you know i got in this book is made out of two summers probably all told 600 negatives or maybe 700 negatives but i i learned my craft with the 8x10 i learned how to find the other side of my personality because i i think of myself as a street photographer playing jazz it's a riff all the time you're watching things move on the street and you're trying to find yourself in the right place how do you get there when the action peaks it's very jazzy and the large camera is like hauling the cello around with you everywhere it's slow it's big it's it's it's um it needs a more meditative approach and the cape slowed me down enough for me to take it in so that the simplicity of light falling on siding as simple as that was enough for me and i began to understand that there's another vocabulary and and i'm grateful that i started on the street because i could make the turn i could pivot to the big camera comfortably because i already had an aesthetic i think it would have been harder if i was starting with the view camera and then trying to give that up and go to the street i don't know if i would know how to dance you know on my on my feet that way so that's what i think you're talking about is that that persona i mean i made a discovery that i was i was a split personality [Laughter] well i they the thing that really strikes me about this story and strikes me about your work the point that i want to amplify right here is that like the best painters you know picasso had his blue period uh and before well before that he was first an extraordinarily gifted draftsman i mean he could sketch realistically incredible like dali same kind of thing and it was only once that they had mastered the the basics the essentials that they could then go off in their own direction but you are someone who has refused to be bound by a single genre and that reflects your own growth i think you can tell me that i'm wrong as a human being and i think about uh you know some of the best musical acts ever getting constrained by what their audience wants just roll out the oldies the goodies the ones we know and you kept going forward so i think this is actually a wonderful time to shift gears and now go all the way back and then go forward again because as we move forward there are a number of images that you uh were so kind as to to let us share but i want to place those in context of your life this sounds a little bit like that tv show your life i didn't mean that this is your life bring out people that i haven't seen in 50 years well yeah yeah it's going to be interesting so so uh no we're not doing that well there are a couple but let's start with what i like to call bp you know before photography i'm talking about the years from 1938 to 1962. and i just love it if you could share with people a little bit about how and where you grew up what did you see how did you become [Music] a from a zygote to joel myrowitz in 1960 we're going to get there but as much as you'd care to share i think it would be fascinating for people to hear because i i keep thinking that every single one of us has a unique story and that's the place to mine one's artistic voice well that little zygote that i was was really smart because i found a great egg and my mother had it and she launched me like like a projectile into the world and immediately as soon as i landed i woke up and said i'm a photographer but i just don't know it yet i'll be there hang out 24 years from now i may get there i grew up in the bronx in a working class family in a kind of neighborhood that you might call a ghetto now um but it was uh it was a kind of wonderful part of the bronx it was um filled with immigrants they were italians and irish and germans and jews and and uh the mix was you know sort of pre-world pre-world war ii and post world war ii so there was an interesting um sort of small town dynamic the subway was on the corner of my block i could get on that subway and be downtown in 30 minutes in the heart of times square but in the bronx where i was it was a sort of country there was a little river that ran by we caught turtles and frogs and bunnies and snakes so i had this kind of wildlife and street life and my father was considered the mayor of the block he was uh well known he was a golden gloves boxing champion so he got a reputation in the neighborhood as being a guy who could handle himself and he was very street smart he had been in vaudeville he was charlie chaplin's standing at the movies made in the gold medal studios in the bronx so he was a character and he was you know a great talker and he was out there all the time and from my father i think i saw that you could talk to anybody that it wasn't anything you know it wasn't so great to be shy it was good to be out there and mix it up and not be afraid and and and my father made people laugh and i think i probably got on that wavelength early and he was also a first-rate athlete having been a boxer and a dancer and he played baseball for money on saturday so i go with him i had a chance to really have a kind of hero worship for my pop who was a truck driver delivering goods around new york it's not like he was an aca you know academic he was a drunk driver but he had native intelligence and he could read straight life beautifully and he would say to me many times as a kid he he sort of nudged me we'd been walking down the street he'd say hey watch that watch that over there and i'd look and two guys would bump into each other or somebody would start an argument or someone would fall on the banana peel you know it was as if he could just point and something would happen i think that that basic hey look at that was a kind of shaping of a sense of wonder in the world and a predictive quality that something might happen and that something could be funny or tragic or fearful or powerful endless and endless descriptions so i got that from my father and you know that's no small thing because it's not like he sat me down to tell me this it was just what rolled off of him in his natural life and and you know we take our lessons in unexpected ways when we're kids you know you think about someone once asked me did you you know did you ever hear anything important like a life lesson from your father and i i mean i think i well yeah once it dries but for the most part just by being with him and observing the way he took in the world that was the life lesson and who knew that it was going to wind up as a camera in my hand you know i i had no idea what i would how i would make that purposeful for myself but now i see that it was a natural thing he was um showing me how rich ordinary life is and how much joy there was in the world and you know that's if you take that in deeply when you're a kid then you look for it for the rest of your life and i have to say this is to all of you out there not just you you but to everybody i am grateful for having been out in the world for [Music] eight 58 all right yeah walking the streets of the world and saying ah wow in other words stuff has come at me that shows me the wonders of the world the beauties the harmonies the tragedies the joys all of it just keeps coming and and as it comes my reflex has allowed me to bring the leica up to my eye and press the button and say yes thank you thank you world for giving me one more time to say ah and be awestruck by it and really everybody that's all there is to it if you do that enough you'll learn how to make a good frame how to be anticipatory of the moment that's actually unfolding in front of you and you are literally reading it with your entire sensory apparatus eyes ears heart physical properties you're reading the unfolding moment and the camera just slices away a little piece of it like that so if you go out into the world armed with awe you will be inspired no matter where you are you won't have to make a vacation to go get a picture you'll just be seeing it in the most ordinary place i'm i'm plotting here and i realize well let's put it this way my dad we talked about this briefly my dad grew up in the bronx same same thing and it was his own kind of ghetto he got into fist fights all the time for anti-semitism and uh he was not a golden gloves champ but i think he weighed a lot more than your dad maybe he was a lot slower i don't know but but as once we moved uh we actually i was born in brooklyn so we moved out of the bronx and then we moved a little bit further out on to uh long island but we used to make fun of my dad because he could just see a sky for the entire his entire life and just be awestruck by it so i think that's just an incredible story all right i don't know how the heck i'm going to cover with you yeah this would take a month just let's move forward let's move forward it you're somehow you now call it 22 you you i don't know how you got to be 22 don't know what you're doing up to that point but around then you become a junior madman is that is that a fair thing to say you because i really was in it 19 1960 i was working for an ad agency in new york which was in the penthouse of the plaza hotel so every day i went down from the bronx by subway i got off at 59th street i walked to the plaza hotel i got in the elevator and up i went to the penthouse of the plaza hotel and it was i mean it was i was cutting mats and doing paste ups and mechanicals you know tiny ledge you know i wasn't an art director i was in what they called the bullpen you know i was like the relief guy you know um when they when they needed someone to work on something they said hey get me someone from the bullpen give me joel joel would come out yeah what do you need guys you know and i would paste up some ad for braziers or for cola or for insurance stuff like that but the thing that was amazing was one day the owner of the advertising agency called into the bullpen he needed someone to schlep some some boxes of a presentation to another uh place in manhattan to the client and so i was sent with the owner and you know they got the taxi together and everything and here's this guy millionaire and he got his own agency he's got a hundred people working for him and me from the bronx and we sit in the car we're talking about things and everything and it was like guy to guy you know let me get to the place and i'm there and he's going to be talking about these things and i take the stuff down anyway when it was all over and we're packing it up and we're going back and he said to me what do you think i was such a straight arrow from the bronx i said i don't think they understood the really good one that you showed them they went for something that looked to me like you know was ordinary and he looked at me and he said which one i said well you know the one with the two people whatever the hell it was and he said you know that's my favorite too i said well don't let them use the other one when you got the best one here you've got to make me i'm telling the owner you know i mean just something and he's looking at me the whole time like who is this and i'm thinking afterwards i'm thinking oh i think i made a mistake i shouldn't have i shouldn't have been so direct well that was the beginning he began to call me to come up to all the meetings in his in in the agency with all the account exactly the mad men the quote the real madmen and i would turn the posters and things like that but then afterwards he would order dinner from the plaza room the oak room of the plaza would get sent up and and a little private elevator would enter the penthouse and a guy would roll a card with a gigantic silver service on it and he would open up dinner and ben saccham and i would sit down i mean i didn't even know which knife and fork to use you know what i mean we'd sit down and have dinner just by this time it could be 10 o'clock at night and he would ask me you know what do you think about it and and i i remember one time i said to him this is i know i'm going a little around here but it's important one time i said to these guys seem to me to be playing it safe because they're protecting their mortgage and they're not telling you exactly what they feel and what you need to hear from them and he looked at me like again like oh so after a while i became like his go-to guy and instead of me going home to the bronx he would say why don't you come and stay over at my place on central parks west at night and will come to work in the morning now he owned he owned what william randolph hearst built on central park west and 60th street on top of the building um william randolph hearst brought a castle from england and rebuilt it on central park west for his mistress who was an opera singer a terrible opera singer that's a story there's been a movie about it and everything um and i would sleep in his in ben sackheim's son's bedroom facing central park here i'm a kid from you know from the the ghetto of the bronx and now i'm working in the plaza and i'm sleeping in the bedroom on central park south west and in the morning a butler serves breakfast you know and i um on the next on the next door terrace outside of the castle is uh a famous broadway star who's starring in damn yankees and she's out on the terrace dancing and singing in the morning and occasionally jumps over the wall to have breakfast with us so suddenly i was in this whole other world and i wasn't a photographer but i was seeing the duality you get out of the subway but you could also be on top of william randolph hearst castle penthouse so life became really um thrilling and what i learned from this was say it like it is don't try to weasel your way around things say what you're thinking and and you know deal with the consequences afterwards and it's the same with seeing you can't just modify you gotta you gotta see you see instantly you respond instantly if you hesitate the photograph that you felt will be gone so fortunately the like is one of these cameras that doesn't hesitate you press the button well the old ones didn't hesitate that's sweet let's be honest they didn't necessarily the new ones are pretty good now but there was a period when they were hesitating too long and i died a thousand times in that fraction of a second but the button didn't go off but that's the past we don't have to deal with that [Music] so that's my that's 62 i mean that's 62. no that's so sick so here's the thing here's the thing we now i want to take us to your origin story the the epiphany the moment so please do tell that story but you've already answered the question i was going to ask you right after that which was what the heck were you thinking when you came back i'm going to stop there and let you tell the story of when you decided to become a photographer yeah so i by 62 i had moved to another agency a small agency in manhattan so i could move up and be an art director instead of in the bullpen and i designed a booklet and my senior art director assigned a photographer i didn't know any photographers i knew nothing about photography but he assigned a photographer to shoot the book and the photographer was a guy named robert frank to me was just a name and uh and my my boss you know had robert set up the location and everything and and i went down to be there to make sure that all the pages of the booklet were covered in the shooting and robert paid no attention to me whatsoever and you know i gave him the booklet he knew what was in there and he started setting up the shooting and i stood behind him and i was fascinated because i was looking over his shoulder at the two young girls he was photographing doing after school activities and he barely spoke to them he used the kind of body language the whole time and every time some gesture between the girls happened in an interesting way i would hear it of his like like that and and i just oh because each time the camera went off the image that i saw was frozen at the apogee of its moment and i i i could see it the sound made me see the moment clearly and i didn't process what was going on but then when it was over i left it was probably 4 30 or something like that and i thought okay i'm going to walk up town to the office and as i was walking on the streets of manhattan everything i saw seemed to be waiting for people hailing taxi cabs people burdened with their laundry or their shopping you know schlepping the bags along people carrying the baby in their arms and cooing to the little baby everything seemed to have momentum as if oh my god in the in the in the fluid movement of life there were intersections you could cut away pieces of time as it flew by and when i understood that it was as if i had begun to process the fact that we could stop a moment of time and and and live in it expand it in some way that made me think that i should stop being a painter because i that's what i was as a painter sort of an action abstract expression is second generation painter and when i got back to the the office harry said to me how was the shoot john and i said oh it was great harrisburg no i'm quitting on friday and i mean he looked at me like huh you quitting i said yeah i said i i'm going to be a photographer and he said why you're an artist and you're an art director i said something about photography that i saw today that i i need to be out on the streets i cannot be in an office anymore i i have to be out on the street and so he said to me do you have camera i was kind of puzzling i said no i don't have a girl he said well how are you going to make photographs if you don't have a camera so it's got a really good question i got i have to get one he said wait a second he opened his drawer and he pulled out his camera which was a single lens reflex camera at the time and he said here use this camera until you can buy a camera and so i went out into the street with this you know clunky single lens reflex japanese camera and i started i started i waited till the pictures came in i made sure the book looked good and then on that friday i took my last paycheck and i hit the streets i didn't know what i was going to do you know because that that job at the time paid me 55 a week rich it was nothing let me tell you it was nothing you could barely pay your rent and have money left over to eat but um i had a little money saved up you know a few hundred dollars and i thought i'm gonna go out and i'm gonna learn to photograph and i'll figure out something later on but i have to do what he's calling me now so my first instinct was i needed to do this and then i figured out a way to do it and i i think that's what's at stake for every one of us it's not the story so much it's when you recognize something of importance to you follow your intuition you'd be lost without it we live on our instinct this is fantastic and what i want to do now is because i i made a promise an ironclad promise to to a hard stop but what i'd like to do now is i'd like to just share with people a number of images across your different periods so let's move to the next section that corresponds so you were in the street from 62 to 64. would you say as that first period corresponding with what you have in the book antonio no i was on the street i was on the street a lot longer yes but but you know i mean still but but you know i started with color and i was learning how to use color and how to expose for it and how to value it and and at a certain point as this picture will show i when i finally had a second camera i was able to buy a leica like in 1964 i s and but all of my friends didn't understand color they kept on saying no black and white is everything and sure it was everything then but i was using color because the world was in color and i didn't know any better and so i was trying to make an argument for color and the way i wanted to do it was by showing color pictures and if there was an opportunity if the moment was just long enough where i could make two shots boom boom i would try to make a paired picture i had two 35 millimeter lenses i tried to i tried to do a picture in which uh you know i could read the picture and see why is color more interesting or is black and white more interesting and if color is why so very early on i was posing what was i think the essential and crucial question for the early 1960s when nobody was really using color it's it's incredible one of the things that i want to come back to is this notion of one's experiences shape one's eyes so you had that initial reaction to robert frank but then you took it a step further you went on the road which is what robert frank had done 10 years earlier in fact i love that you have that section of your book entitled on the road because it's also uh a double entendre jack kerouac the famous beat writer also produced the forward to robert frank's book and then you made that quite literal and traveled extensively through europe yeah well you know i think i i think my generation in particular was deeply influenced by robert's dark poem about america and all of us needed to go out and see it for ourselves because it was always changing and and you know robert caught it in the late 50s and here we were into the 60s now and we were leading up to the vietnam war and you know things were changing and it was important to go out and and see the country you live in so that you can understand something about your identity and and what's going on in your country and the road trip is it's a great romance for photographers to be out on the road and to be in strange places and see things that you don't see but i i had a little advantage in that i went to school in columbus ohio i went to college in columbus ohio because they had a great swimming team and i was on the swimming team in the bronx when i was in high school and i wanted to swim for college and my grades weren't so great that i could get into yale or stanford who also had good teams but ohio state had a great swimming team so i went there and i was in the midwest and i traveled a lot around the midwest by hitchhiking and by riding the rails believe it or not box cars around the midwest with a woman friend of mine not my girlfriend a friend an art another art student and we would we would just get in a box car on a friday night and wind up somewhere on saturday morning and you know we'd be in louisville or st louis and cincinnati or you know wherever the hell we were and we would just you know scope it all out and then try to figure out how to get back to columbus in time for monday so i i was used to it in some sense but i wasn't photographing it i was just sort of taking in the zeitgeist of the country from that perspective which is the hobo and and she was an incredibly courageous woman older than me you know and just like just my art school buddy really and and uh lois was her name and and i i loved her as a friend you know she just she in a way she taught me a little bit about how to be a man you know because she was so risky risk taking so that was great but it inspired me to take road trips when i started making photographs to really get on the road i i'm so upset that there's so much more i want everyone to see but okay this was a little bit overly ambitious and we have five minutes left you guys promised well if you can go longer if you want to go a little longer um i'll go a little longer with you i can go a little longer i mean it's up to you happy to go longer wow well that would be amazing what we're looking at right now are several of the images that you took with the deardorff uh up in provincetown antonio can you go to the portraits just wrote in go longer so okay okay i'll i'll twist there all right well i i chose a number of these uh pictures because they resonated with me in such a profound way we'll talk about that offline but of all of your portraits the one portrait that just leapt off the page to me was of this young woman in the middle of a party and i i like to say that you can always tell something about the relationship between the subject and the photographer even if it's only in a fleeting moment but this image just knocked my socks off and you took it with an 8x10 camera with a long exposure where were you in your life when you took this shot joel i have to ask well i had just begun shooting with the 8x10 a matter of weeks before so i didn't really know the camera very well at that point i was um i was learning to take all kinds of risks i wasn't just shooting landscapes you know and i carried the camera with me everywhere i went and so someone invited me to this cocktail party in wellfleet you know the camera came i came off the beach where i had been photographing and swimming and then i came to the party and um at some point in the party you know everybody's moving around you can see some people are actually in motion that shows how long the exposure is and i'm standing in the party and i see this incredibly beautiful young woman leaning against the tree and you know it's a party for older people mostly cocktail party and she's like 17 and everybody else is in their 40s and and i could say that she had sort of dropped out from a second and i i had the camera up on its sticks you know i always carried it full out and i i quickly framed it and then i just whispered across the space to her caught her attention and i said just stay as you are it's all i said to her no more i put a sheet of film in you know she looked at the camera i made the exposure which was probably a half to a second you know because i was risking i was trying to not lose it with everybody moving that wouldn't have been fun but i figured she's leaning against the tree she'll hold still and so i got the picture and and what i saw was how a young person sometimes is lost in their own um in our way or their own life and they don't quite relate to everybody and they drop out of the social mix and so we had that connection at that moment now there's a crazy i know her now she's one of like one of the board members of aperture she's become a friend over the years but what you don't know in this picture is that a few years later i'm going to tell a story a few years later i had a show and i published this book and then one day i get a call and i it's like a gangster who's on the license is this joe amayo it's i said yes he said you know that picture you have with that girl in the party i said yes he said i want that picture and i said well okay you can go to my gallery he's an honor i want that picture and i'd like you to bring it to me i said well but i have a gallery to do that he said look my name is so-and-so and i'm the chairman of the board of warner pictures he said and i want you to come to my office on the top of rockefeller center and i'll buy you a sandwich he said you can bring me this picture i said well what's your interest in the pictures that's my granddaughter he said and you have revealed her to the family in a way that we never saw and so we understand something about her now she's a teenager but now and this is how he talks he talks like you know martin scorsese i said he was talking like that so i go up and i have lunch with the chairman of the board of warner brothers pastrami sandwich which is a stage from the stage deli and good choice again and and we're sitting around talking about life and everything and and he says so what do you want i said what do you mean what do i want pastrami sandwich just fine he said no uh what do you want we've got we do books we have hotels we do movies i say okay i'll direct a blockbuster if you let me i'll direct a blockbuster for you and i'll do one of two things i'll either cost you a lot of money and will lose everything or i'll make a picture that might just be a world favorite it's a gamble he said to me you're crazy don't do that you're an artist they'll eat you alive in hollywood you don't want to do this jaw save yourself please and then he calls out to her father who is upstairs in his office and he yells up to steve ross and says steve you got to come down here and see this photograph of you your daughter he said and this guy wants to make a hollywood movie and steve ross the head of warner brothers production bills down he's crazy what an outstanding an outstanding story i had no idea all from this power but you see that's that's what it is with photography somebody has a passionate moment in this case it was the grandfather but it could be someone who just loves the place or something like that and then they enter your life if you're an artist and maybe something comes of it's another chance another layer of chance is revealed and so you have a chance to play the game on another layer and life is meant to be lived and to have fun and photography has been fun for me even at its most serious even when i was in the middle of ground zero doing all that work there was enough everyday stimulation beauty and and and moment and humor dark humor all of it made me so excited like i was there 12 14 hours a day because it was so fantastic i couldn't couldn't leave so that's an incredible story yeah well so let's just uh forward antonio if you could pull up the photograph from aftermath uh of the world trade center and joel i want to uh thank you for going past but i still want to be mindful of your time i want to share this image and then although this wasn't the image that you chose for uh cape uh not cape light before your other book to juxtapose with tuscany there is something about that juxtaposition between as bad as it gets and maybe as good as it gets because i think we should at least show these two photographs and have you talk about them and then but let's only do that if you promise you will still answer my question what's the question i was talking about this first okay uh okay so i had been my wife maggie and i had been commissioned to do a book on tuscany because we had taught in tuscany for like six summers a workshop in tuscany writing and photography and my publisher in new york said oh do a book on tuscany and i was supposed to go away in october and instead after 9 11 i decided to spend my time in new york and i was spending the advance money for the book on on digging myself out of ground zero but at some point he called up and he said hey uh have you gone to thai i said no we didn't go to tuscany we're in we're in grounds i'm in ground zero doing this work which is more important to me right now and he said you gotta go to tuscany one of these days i said i will when when is quiet here and i've had two or three months in this i'll go to tuscany so and in in the in the winter of 2002 january 2002 i already had been down inside the site for three and a half months i went to tuscany and what happened was that in tuscany i was in a normal world people plowed the earth they planted you know uh the fields were tilled and they had been doing this for thousands of years in tuscany and suddenly i was reminded well we were both reminded because maggie was writing essays about this we were both reminded that the world is essentially a good place we live on this paradise of a planet and although we are screwing it up major we still live on it and it still has its seasons and its beauties and so it restored my faith in in the goodness of the of the world and in mankind and it allowed us to write essays and make pictures that showed the alternate reality and it was a way for us to say let's remember that the world is still a good place regardless of acts of terrorism and murder it is basically a good place and i want to show you what exists now as a kind of antidote to the poison and then i would go back after spending two or three weeks in tuscany i would go back and get right into my gear and go into ground zero and spend another two months or three months in ground zero and then go away again for a few weeks so i had this you know sort of seesaw between the two and it was restorative for me but it also made me understand that when i finished this work in ground zero the changes that i was going through would have an effect on me in the sense that i felt it would be important in the future to do works that were not self-involved but that often had some kind of social value in them and and i think it's important to alternate if i was in america now not just during the pandemic but during the trump era i would be out photographing this incredible change when democracy's foundation is being challenged and and seems to be you know corrupted in such a way who's photographing out there i hope there are young artists who are out there showing us what what divisions we're facing in you know in the midst of a you know a deathly pandemic and and loss of of you know jobs in america and the crushing income loss of the economy aren't there people photographing this the way robert photographed america they gary forgotten america i hope so they're there there are and the one of the first people who come to mind is a young man named devin allen who is actually in the midst of protests two of his uh photographs have made the cover of time magazine but i i agree with you completely i i can't be in new york i can't be in new york it's not just about my life but it's not just about statistics it's about also expected value calculations but i agree we are at an inflection point one once in a century kind of inflection point so i i think that's there's nothing more important so with that i now want to ask you the question again i think you've teed it up just in an incredible way and that is not as a photographer but as joel myrowitz who has been on this mortal coil more than eight decades the the educator the philosopher poet if there is one thing that you want to communicate the one truth or the one piece of advice one human being to another that you want to share what is it that's a tight rope question you know and the tight rope is strung across two skyscrapers like philip petty when he walked across the yeah you know if we're talking about photography which is what this question is aimed at i would say that as human beings we are gifted with an incredible visual scope we can feel i'm looking straight at the camera i can see my fingers wiggling without moving my eyes maybe it's because i'm looking at the picture i can see my food is ready so we are as human beings incredibly binocular you know we've got a great scan and with that comes the development of finely tuned survival instincts an instinct is what underscores the making of photographs impulse and instinct and too often we narrow our instincts down to do things that have already been done there was once a well-known educator artist in the mid 20s and 30s in america named robert henry and he he taught uh he was part of i think the ashken in school or just before and he once said we are not here to do what has already been done and when i learned that in art school i actually did handmade calligraphy of that sign and i put it up over my bed so that every day when i got up to go out to school i saw we are not limited to what has already been done and it's that way in photography too now you can't help yourself because the frame is the same frame for everybody just about 35 millimeter is 35 millimeter but you can fill that frame with your own intuition the thing that calls you if you listen clearly to the heartbeat of your impulse and your instinct if you do not hesitate you bring the camera up and it doesn't matter what the frame is like you know it's okay to make crappy frames at first as long as the information is in there you might actually succeed in making an interesting photograph and it will teach you to tune yourself your instrument of yourself so that you'll be faster and closer and better and your timing and understanding and all of this will be more effective and by accumulating these instincts and laying them out on x contact sheets or on your screen in lightroom or whatever you use you'll begin to see the accumulated understandings that you have arrived at and therein lies your wisdom that's you it's a reflection of the things that you hold dear or important or meaningful necessary lively your spontaneity and understanding are cohesive in that moment and the only way you can find your identity as an artist as a human being through photography is to look at these pictures and read them for the truth of your singularity your instinct it's the simplest thing you are armed with it as a basic native you know intelligence but we sometimes fail to use it in the truest way we modify it so that it looks like somebody else's work or something you saw on instagram or something you saw in your book and i say screw that you make your mistakes because your mistakes will be your education so if i could if that's what i have to offer i you know take from it what you can but it's how i've lived my life by believing in in this native instinct thank you for that all right i i okay normally i'm reasonably coherent i'm just for clamped from all of this but guys again with only two books really pick up cape light and if you want to really think through how much you have in your life here's the book that i recommend among all of them by joel because it serves as an inspiration for figuring out all of the stories and experiences and how you can mine them for your own artistic voice it's called where i find myself and of course if you want to go a little bit deeper but you guys mostly have this already hey would it be okay for me to just add a note to everybody out there because a book certainly is i mean i've used books all my life to learn from you know and in my day the books were very few you know i had three books i had cartier-bresson's decisive moment walker reference american photographs and robert frank's the americans those were the three books in 1962. it wasn't like a lot of books like today we've got thousands but recently i made with the masters of photography online five and a half hours of courses modules there's 35 modules they run four or five minutes 10 minutes 12 minutes but it's a it's a talking it's like a talking book and and i i if if you're interested in upping your game this is something you might want to you know it's not terribly expensive and you know you spend more on a couple of meals out but um i i really tried to make it an intimate personal experience in which i tried to say everything that you and i would like to say to you over the next five and a half hours but it's not going to work i will vouch i will vouch for this i i bought it myself it is the best online course in the genre i have ever taken and i i'm not saying that for any other reason then it is absolutely the way that i feel joel's humanity comes through uh the wisdom of all of those decades comes through and it also dresses a number of points that we didn't get to like the fact that although photography is generally thought of as a very singular uh occupation or preoccupation there is also room for collaboration and he gets into that in the most wonderful way joel thank you man i knew this was going to be great what a pleasure what a privilege and thanks so much for going a little bit longer with us my pleasure i'm only sorry i couldn't answer some of the questions that people are putting in but maybe we'll have a follow-up someday i would love that thank you you you're really wonderful to have a conversation with i really appreciate it thanks everybody at leica to my my great support system ciao bye

Channel: Leica Camera USA

Views: 24,291

Rating: 4.9229422 out of 5

Keywords: Leica Conversations, Leica Camera USA, Joel Meyerowitz, Hugh Brownstone, Leica Akademie USA

Id: 0F5C-Kch87c

Length: 75min 12sec (4512 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020