Visions and Images: Joel Meyerowitz, 1981

[Music] n [Music] the hello I'm barar Lee diamondstein welcome to visions and images American photographers on photography today we'll be talking to Joel marwitz Joel merwitz has been photographing since the early 60s when he took to the streets he is one of the photographers who has made the transition from seeing in terms of black and white to recreating a world World defined by color a leading figure in the new color movement of modern art photography he is widely admired for his masterful handling of it and his exploration of the effects of light and Shadow a very warm welcome to you Joel marowitz you were working as an art director at a small advertising agency when you decided to try photography how did that decision come about it came about like photographs themselves instantaneously I had been assigned to travel downtown with a photographer named Robert Frank and observe his uh his shooting for an afternoon and I was astonished by it I thought to myself I had never seen anything like that before and when I returned to the agency in the afternoon I resigned I felt that there was something else out there for me rather than sitting in an office and uh making thumbnail sketches of products and advertisements did you know anything about taking photos photography was uh on the one hand a mystery to me on the other hand um a commercial Enterprise I had seen the work of Richard avidon and Irving Penn and hero and Magnum life photographers but I had never seen any serious work and I I thought about Matthew Brady as one person I didn't realize he was a dozen people working and uh it didn't occur to me that that serious photography existed I just knew that I had to go out in the street with a camera and photograph so how did you learn about the technical things well that's something you do by doing it I I wasn't smart enough to ask uh about a school I'm not even sure schools existed at that point and I uh I borrowed a camera from a friend and then I purchased a a single ends reflex camera and I made photographs and at night I would look at them I shot in color right at the beginning because I I couldn't print black and white and color seemed to me to be the most natural thing to turn to in the evenings I would look at the slides and if they were too bright I would know to make them darker the next time and if they were too dark I'd make them lighter it's a very pragmatic simple-minded approach to making photographs well what made you take to the streets as your basic environment it seemed natural to me to go right to the street that was the the stream that's where the fish were that's where I wanted to be and walking the streets provided me with all kinds of opportunities uh that are about chance and time and speed and I I didn't see photography as something that I should manipulate in any way that I should arrange like a portrait or a still life or anything Studio bound I felt that it was about instantaneity the and memory you've said too and memory well you have to remember everything that you do so that you know to build on that the next time you work when I when I photograph uh I have a machine that chips away at time at a thousandth of a second or 250th of a second and I learn to make gestures in that small sliver of time somehow to thrust myself into a crowd or into a situation and that's what I saw Robert Frank doing that first afternoon I think that's what moved me more than anything else was the fact that he was in motion while he was making still photographs and it seemed to me to be some kind of irony there that you could flow and and dance and keep alive and at the same time Chip Away things and just cut them off and I like that I like the physicality of that you've described your early influences while growing up in the Bronx is low class but fun there must have been something very special about that environment that influenced you and your two younger brothers well I think that the the uh throbbing energy of the tenement and the street pervades your life I mean there's always a drama outside your door or your window it's the neighbors down the hall uh enacting their uh Molly Goldberg or whatever family situation goes on and right outside your window is the same thing there are lovers in the street and quarrels and fights and car accidents and Peddlers going by it was a a very uh full environment I mean there's a casualness about photography now people just go like that and there's a picture It Isn't So Much based on framing or rules of composition anything academic or classical it's about what the content is it almost doesn't matter if it's framed nicely if the content is strong and you feel something from the photograph you've got a photograph earlier work is part of that modern tradition that is referred to as street photography I wonder if you take a moment and explain to us what that means street photography it means to me being out on the street using your wits and your um your sense of place your sense of yourself in that place your willingness to deal with chaos and uh arbitrariness things come at you and you have to um work with them you have to be responsive and full of feeling and you have to pay attention it's a kind of uh reving in the chaos of the street that I think is what underlies the uh the idea of street photography there are several Central figures to that movement to the works of which ones do you most respond well I I think that winr is the reigning uh Duke of street photography he's got the most playful mentality he's alive to the possibilities of the street he's uh careless in the most wonderful way and I think what's in his mind is in his photographs well you have a particular reason to ass for assigning that uh Regal role to him I guess it would be fair to say that he is one of your earlier mentors can you tell us about that when I first went out on the street and I wandered around Fifth Avenue I would bump into this curly headed guy with a camera here and there and occasionally we uh would see each other working and we would join forces in some way I would accompany him on his rounds and he would come with me for whatever I was doing and I began to see what his appetite was about I think that's what I learned from Gary that you could trust the street to provide that there was lots out there that life was a thrill and he being 10 years older than me and having had a lot of experience on the street and doing magazine work and the like he sort of showed me that that's what was possible I think that's my my debt to Gary more than anything else do you do any Studio work at all and if not not why not I'm I'm not at home in the studio I don't know what to make of Noam you know it's it's more thrilling for me to be out in the street on location on the edge of the Grand Canyon or in curau or Paris that three or four years ago you were best known for your street photography and then you abandoned your handheld 35 millim camera and as you just mentioned you've changed to an Old-Fashioned large format stand camera that that was used by 19th century landscape photographers that is quite a departure was there any set of circumstances that forced you or caused you to take that kind of risk yes there are qualities within the medium that force you to confront your own behavior I mean at every inch along the way I I think you do that you judge your own work you you sort of see where you're going and where you're coming from and certain questions are raised by that and and one of them for me was quality in in the color print in the image itself I mean photography is a thing of prints you hold it in your hand you get absorbed in it it draws you in you have to have this thing to hold I still photograph with a small camera almost daily but I've learned to use two different instruments to play two different kinds of music to experience two different feelings about time one is about duration and the other is about instantaneity but let me go back for a moment I had always been um strongly in favor of color photography I think it's a half step closer to the way we feel and see reality but I had to work in black and white because you couldn't print color with a kind of um ease and and command that you could print black black and white and so it was more effective to do black and white photography at a point in the' 70s when color technology made one more turn in the revolution in photography I understood that now was the moment to throw all the risk in that area you know technology has always changed photography why don't you describe the equipment that you use now and some of the things that prompted the shift what particular issues arose well it was a big step to cut off uh black and white work and commit myself to color you're really changing the nature of your response you know it's uh it's a very different game out there black and white has more more form in it somehow pictures look like there's a compressed formal structure running through them that events a tie to In Color there's more of a languid um flow from one thing to the other and learning how to make that switch is a is a departure was a departure for me the issue that I was most interested in was the the description of things in a photograph and I felt at some point that black and white 35mm imagery degraded in some way when you made a print larger than 11 by4 it began to turn into grain and gristle in some strange way and I wanted something more articulate than that and color has that characteristic it's very full it has a long elegant tonal range and I'm not a salon printer or a salon photographer but I'm interested in telling as clearly as I can what it is I see and feel and color seems to do that so I made some investigations into color printing 35mm negative and 35 Lim me to slides and the like I had no idea what I was in search of that's not how I think about making photographs I go to a place to be in the place when I'm there I try and make photographs about how I feel about being there somehow that changed the nature of my game how do you contrast your old style with your new style well let's see one is about physical activity and gesture and spontaneity and thrust and you know just like that it's fast you have no time expanded time to examine your feelings with an 8x10 View Camera you have time there is this idea of duration things sit there waiting for you today's audience for photography is Art oriented as a result they are often suspicious of work that is beautiful have you ever experienced the bias against pretty pictures yes I've I've observed that some critics feel that uh if you take a picture of what looks like a pretty place or a beautiful place that you've only done half a job and I I don't think that my work looks like that frankly if you go to the very places that I stood in it's unlikely that anybody else would want to make that photograph it's an empty Bay strewn with seaweed and some bottles boats turned on this side or it's a a casual and dumpy little Bungalow or a fence and some chairs nothing to speak of really what I think confuses some people is that when you see it in its great clarity and Stillness it glows in some way it becomes beautiful and it's so convincingly beautiful that they say oh that place is beautiful not necessarily so but color has always been the unwanted guest of Photography the thing that was best left to amateurs and what I really wonder if you would comment on if color photography has finally shed that kind of status actually inferior status that was assigned to it by partisans of formalist black and white photography I think it may be the other way around and that that the partisans have shed their prejudices that there's been enough color imagery coming out now there a whole Young Generation of photographers that pick up color right away because now there's a choice and what happens is people begin to see that you could make a color picture as interesting as a black and white picture it doesn't have to be about that red coat over there or that you know blue object sitting on something else it can be about your ideas that it's as full of ideas and question and imagery as black and white and so on its terms it's become convincing you have several unusual ideas during the course of your career more than a decade ago you made a an unorthodox an unorthodox comment on what could literally be described as the passing scene and what I am referring to is the photographs that you made through the window of a car traveling at 50 m an hour on a 20,000 M tour that you took through the British aisles in Europe and Morocco and Greece what were the circumstances of that was it an assignment were there precise instructions how did that all come about no it was uh a trip something I earned and I gave to myself and part of traveling is sitting in a car every day and going from place to place and I'm I'm sure you've seen this I know it's happened in most of my photographs come out that way oh looking that way or May for those Reas but I mean how many times have you been sitting next to someone say did you see that and when someone turns around they say what where you say it was wonderful and it's nothing more than a figure walking across the landscape or it's a horse uh kneeling down or some ordinary unnecessary object or or unnecessary event I should say and what I think happened to me was that I recognized them as significant through the means of the camera that you could just reach as you go by and the camera with 1,000th of a second will snare that and hold it fixed in any way that you reached for it purely photographic Instinct you met carte Bron at an early point in your own career under rather unusual circumstances I wonder if you would recall them for us well it was one of those uh thrilling moments of childhood in that way I was out on a on a uh St Patrick's Day Parade photographing with Tony Ray Jones and another photographer and there was a man in the crowd darting and twisting and turning and pouting and leaping and and we were astonished by this this fantasy in front of us and we assumed that it could only be Kier brason we had been photographing about a year the three of us and had only recently seen his book and we just deduced that those pictures were made by someone who pirouetted that way and I went over and said to him uh excuse me sir are you uh C your bre on and he said no no are use a police I said no I'm I'm not I'm just a photographer and he said yes I'm Kon you meet me here afterwards and I'll take you for coffee and it was astonishing we stood back a few paces and we watched him and he was was a a thrilling btic figure moving in and out of the crowd thrusting himself pulling back turning away he was so full of of uh kind of a MIM quality that we learned instantaneously that it's possible to a face yourself in the crowd that you could just turn over your shoulder like a bull fighter doing a a Pasad and you're well I guess he also learned to use that camera as a weapon you learned that then too yes that's true I I saw him hurl it at somebody a drunk who came out of the crowd at at brone trying to reach for his camera and brone threw it at him and it was tied to his wrist and it sort of snapped out and came back into his hand and he turned and went away sounds like a yo-yo was very much like that and he just he pulled it in like a third baseman and it was effortless and the other fellow stunn threw himself fell back into the crowd and Bron was gone your work is meticulous and impeccably printed but it appears to be be directed toward a very different audience for whom are they made there's only one answer and they're made for me there's no audience as far as I'm concerned I mean I'm the audience are photographs for looking at things yes real hard and I I study photographs I read my own photographs for many years what do they teach you they teach you since they deal with the immediate past or as long as you want to stretch your own past out I mean you can make pictures in January and February and March and not look at them until the summertime if you choose they teach you about your own unraveling past or the immediacy of yesterday and they show you what you looked at you know because I assume that if you take a photograph you've been responsive to something and that you looked hard at it hard for a thousandth of a second hard for 10 minutes but hard nonetheless and it's that quality of of um that bite that teaches you how up you were for that thing and where you stand relative to it since 1965 one of the most photographed objects in this country is AOS sarin and 630t Arch in St Louis it's dominated that City and for several months of your life it dominated you in the fall of 1977 you used that Arch as your subject in spite of the fact it had been photographed so often can you tell us how and by whom that commission came about and why that subject matter and why that place what can I say I've been through a lot of places and they don't feel right they don't invite you to come back and look around but something about the The Emptiness of the downtown area the proximity of the river the grace of the arch all of it said there's something here and I was asked to come out and spend 4 weeks over a period of a year to do what I felt like doing which was walking around and discovering myself in St Louis and photographing what was interesting to me and so that's what produced those pictures they're basically curiosity the Curiosity of a Stranger in a Strange place you've been called the very model of a museum of modern art photographer a product of that photo aesthetic that is promoted by that institution I think that some people view the museum as too powerful a place and it's not the museum is a library it holds ideas it has uh changing bodies of work it's um very much the width and breath of the real stream of art photography or painting and the man who stands in the position to see what's coming down that stream best in this case is John shovsky is a real fisherman he loves the sport and he stands in that River and he picks up whatever comes his way and he says that's interesting it's a little small I'll put that back it'll come by again next year and I think his generosity and his appetite for the game brings us a wide range of photographs to look at and to think about among your street photographs very few record specific events however there is one that depicts an accident in Paris MH is it surprising to you that that photo is probably among your best known works and perhaps you might describe the circumstances of that picture well it's not surprising that's the uh the height of the decisive moment aesthetic something happens you happen to be in the right place at the right time with a tool you make a picture because you know how to make pictures and situations like that as soon as I've I mean quite often when I've shown that photograph people have screamed at me why didn't you run over and help that man instead of taking a picture and I usually answer well I don't speak French that well I could I could resist that man and all those other people were standing around why didn't they help them you in a way you're an opportunist you know you make pictures out of what's handed to you and you once said I can't photograph something I don't like it's an enormous luxury is that accurate have you ever had to do that no I haven't had to do anything like that I what I mean by that in a in a more elaborated way is that I can't go and photograph um Bedford Styers for pleasure when I go to a place like bedy I feel the need of the place and I can't make aesthetic works out of someone else's depredation you've been in the thick of it and on the streets all of your life in fact you're especially partial I suspect to Street photographers you're currently working on an on an historical survey of American street photography what will that be about and to what era do you date its Origins I joined forces with a man named colen westerbeck Jr who writes on photography and we began giving ourselves the pleasure of afternoons in archives and museums looking at photographs no acts to grind just to look and see what was there and so what did you found we found a very rich history of people who were crazy in the street who had the right kind of temperament for Street photographers people who were willing to risk it all with the snap of a shudder your work frequently records the interplay of natural and artificial light at Twilight at what time of day do you work at your best well I think because I have two different materials that I work with I have two preferred hours I love the Sunny Side of the Street in the middle of the day you can find me on Fifth Avenue any any day any Glorious Day With The View Camera there's a tendency because of the camera's qualities to work later the camera has uh the film I should say has a long way of looking into the Twilight very tough it records everything it's it draws out of that time all the information and makes it very palpable some way do you plan to explore further your work in the the American landscape and do you plan to continue in that direction and explore either the mountainous regions or the deserts I love making photographs wherever I go so I'm sure I'll be in the southwest sometime and I'll make photographs there but I I can't say that there's a 40th parallel idea that I have that I want to Traverse the country and cover every inch of it along that line I I just take it as it as it comes I did learn something about working in in the west when I spent time in St Louis and that's that the subtle character of the light is enough to change things for you things feel differently out there there's the dust in the air as opposed to the clarity in the air in New York City or so maybe it's about being on the coast and being Inland you describe that when you look through this vintage camera the images are all there there but they're upside down how do you make that adjustment you spent some time on your head for a while it's at at first I helped myself by taking a mirror in and making a reflex out of it just like that Nikon you had before I turned it right side up and it makes things into a wonderful mysterious surreality at first people seem to walk on the ceiling and uh Furniture floats how do you compensate for that and how do you get the same immediacy and urgency that you get by looking at things really with a naked eye it's a wonderful absorption in the in the thing itself you learn to give up content in context which is what you do with a small camera you always looking outside and seeing it right side up now when you're in the dark of the cloth and the camera you have a theater for yourself and that theater is fascinating and if things are upside down without gravity you accept them and somehow make a picture out of that thank you Jill marwitz for sharing your intelligent disciplined eloquent approach to your art and thank you very much for sharing it with us thank you audience for coming to I'm barbar Lee diamondstein for visions and images American photographers on [Music] photography [Music] a

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Keywords: interview, visual, arts, photography, photographer

Id: 5NVk7nuYPI4

Length: 30min 16sec (1816 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 08 2008