INTRODUCTION

Why photography? When Joel Meyerowitz and I sat down to discuss his life and work, this question always underpinned our conversations. Over the course of a career spanning six decades, Joel has made a significant contribution to the history of photography. His curiosity and enquiring approach permeate every body of work he has produced. But how did he arrive at photography, and what about the medium fascinates him, and has continued to provide new stimulation, up to the present day? Intuition and impulse have defined the photographic life of Joel. After witnessing Robert Frank at work in the summer of 1962, he unhesitatingly made the decision to abandon his career in art direction to become a photographer. Seeing Frank work persuaded him that the fluidity of photography could create instances of visual intensity charged with poetic revelation, and he resigned from his job that same day. “I’m going to be a photographer”, he announced to his boss. At that point Joel did not even own a camera.

The trust in his instinct which determined that first life-changing decision has proven to be one of the cornerstones of his entire oeuvre. This is true of his street photography, a practice defined by instinctive recognition and quick reaction, as well as of the work he made with the more cumbersome large format camera, which he used as a tool to connect with the visceral perception, the receptiveness and the insight that he calls his ‘divining rod’.

A central element in Joel’s photography is transmitting the awe of an experience; indeed, when asked how he knows what to photograph, he often says it is the feeling of ‘gasp’ that generally presses him to make the picture. In our conversation he talks about his desire to get out of the way, so that we viewers can step into his shoes and experience what he felt there and then.

Ultimately, for Joel it is the photographer himself who is the real medium. It is he who combines emotion and intellect to convey the feeling of a lived moment, the fullness of a now inscribed in its entirety. Every picture speaks to Joel about the relationship between his imagination, his sensitivity, and his subconscious, and offers him clues about his own identity. By encapsulating fragments of the world, he seeks to recognize parts of himself. Photography for him is, therefore, not so much a window on the world, but more precisely a window on the world as experienced by him.

It is not at the things themselves that Joel is looking at through his pictures, but rather at their connections, at their unseen relationships, and at the way the camera can reveal them: the bouquet overlapping the flowerbed, the leaping tiger and the indifferent crowd, the turbulent ocean waters next to the still swimming pool, the slanting lamppost and the evening sunlight projected over trees, houses and hills.

Joel’s relation to photography is characterized by an incessant research, which is marked by a versatility of means and genres. His approach has demanded that he periodically move on from specific subjects, strategies or themes once they become too familiar to him. This has led him to explore photographic fields including street pictures, landscape pictures, portrait pictures, pictures shot from a moving car, still-lifes, and most recently self-portraits. With the evolving variety of his scope, Joel continuously addresses the nature of the medium, and what it is that is so unique and peculiar to the photographic image.

This volume offers an intimate perspective on Joel’s motivation, his sense of self, and the ways that his character has informed his work. His memory is as vivid as his photographs because, as he explained right at the beginning of our talks, each picture contains an encapsulated experience that expands in his mind every time he looks at it. For this reason, most of our discussions are framed either around a specific photograph or a group of photographs, exploring the depth of Joel’s memory and the possible associations connected with the pictures. In parallel, I have also sought to cover the most important landmarks of his career, relating them both to aesthetic problems and practical issues. We have not followed a fixed plan or schematic structure, since we wanted to keep the talks as spontaneous as possible, thus allowing for an authentic dialogue. However, in the interest of clarity the transcriptions have then been edited into a broadly chronological order to give a better sense of the course of Joel’s career.

The conversations contained in this book were recorded over the arc of a year and a half, from April 2019 to October 2020. During this time, Joel and I met on several occasions, starting out in the dappled sunshine on the Italian island of Giglio, then in London, at his home in Tuscany and finally, as the events of 2020 made meeting in person impossible, we concluded our talks with video calls. A talented raconteur, Joel is engaging, articulate and skilled at explaining his methods. His animated discussion is rich with visual references. Just as with his photography, he avoids the cliché, the verbose expression, and prefers to establish an intimate and playful connection with his interlocutor.

Joel has always been generous and expansive in his interactions with his audience, whether in print or in person. However, for the first time, this book provided the opportunity to gather together the core elements of his perspective on photography, as well as share some of his insights, some of the personal stories from his seemingly endless store, and the context to some of the most well-known photographs he has produced.

Lorenzo Braca