1. BUBBLES OF MEMORY. LEARNING THE ALPHABET OF PHOTOGRAPHY

The memorial value of pictures / Meeting Tony Ray-Jones / On the street with Garry Winogrand / Building his first darkroom / The photographic gesture / John Szarkowski’s influence / Gatherings at Winogrand’s place / Documentary and street photography / “New Documents” / Street photography and the art world / Large scale prints

Joel Meyerowitz: When I look back, little bubbles of memory come up. They are not of big significance, but they have stayed with me. Why do certain memories keep coming back, and give me so much pleasure? What was it about those moments? We all have memories that pop up to us right away when we think about the past; they are something pleasurable, or frightening, or profound. Wouldn’t it be interesting actually to save those memories in some way, and then at some point lay them out and ask why were they so important? Why, out of the billions of moments of consciousness of your life, why are those so significant to you? Why do they keep coming back?

I think the same is true for the arc of one’s photographic life: the making of pictures, the effect of selecting them and being analytical, printing and holding on to them. This kind of cumulative memory, coming out of the discipline of being an artist, began to shape my sense of what photography is, my value system, the little universe of imagery that is a reflection of my core. Going back over these things now, little things are popping up—a meeting with John Szarkowski, an afternoon spent with Lee Friedlander, a day on Cape Cod with my kids, printing in the darkroom and looking at the pictures when I took them out of the dryer, and why certain pictures keep on vibrating and still excite when I look at them. I can remember everything that went into the moment, not just making the pictures, but bringing me back to the place where I made the picture, where the challenge was interesting enough for me. These moments are all fluid, and now, in conversation with you, I think we can find them, and align them, and try and identify them. This is about the handful of pictures and memories that define one’s essential self, and perhaps later on, we might be able to make a real alignment that has some truth in it.

Lorenzo Braca: Talking about the memorial value of pictures in this way might make you sound a little sentimental, but I know that your vision is not a nostalgic one. On the contrary, you are hungry for life; always looking forward for the revelation that a glimpse of a moment can offer you about the present time and about yourself. Your entire career in photography, which is now sixty years long, offers continuous evidence of this.

JM: I certainly have the sweet sense of sentimentality, nostalgia, but I try not to use that photographically as my stimulus. As a photographer, you realize every moment is disappearing as you see it; you feel it, maybe you anticipate it, because that’s the training one gets on the streets—how to anticipate what might occur, and then put yourself in the flux in a way, so that it can deliver. Or if something else that you couldn’t anticipate happens instead, you can be enriched by that. What I learned, early in the sixties, was that the click of the camera tears a piece of fluid reality out of the flow, and saves it on film. That makes it an extremely modern art form—at least in the perspective of the time—because it accepts the idea of fragmentation.

LB: Fragmentation was central to your street work, because it spoke to the quality of life in New York City, but fragmentation is also an important aspect of our memory. Our brain stores only particles of information that it then uses to reconstruct the whole event. The writer Jorge Luis Borges beautifully defined the sketchy nature of memory as a “disorder of undefined possibilities”. Photography conforms to the way memory works; the sentiment, the impulse, and the urgency to make photographs is somehow bound to our need to preserve and transmit. I know that, for you, photography is a window on an ongoing present, or on the illusion of being able to communicate the freshness and awe of an experience that, thanks to photography, persists in its potential startling charge. This awareness, however, was not clear to you in the early days.

JM: When I was beginning, I didn’t have a real understanding of what the whole meaning of photography would be. Certainly, I didn’t know that it would play a role in memory for me. Every time I look at one of my photographs, for whatever reason, it’s as if time and space expand in some way, and I’m back there. Of course, at the beginning I didn’t know that I would develop this capability, and that it would mean so much to me to carry around this encyclopedic treasure trove of memories. My memory only works like that with photographs, and this may be the reason why photography was so compelling to me and satisfied me in ways that painting didn’t.

LB: In 1859, when photography was still in a gestational phase, the physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes notoriously defined it as “a mirror with a memory”.1 I think this definition reveals the dual nature of the medium, which deals with both the transient and the enduring. I like to think of photography as something that retains both the lightness and immediacy of the immaterial image, and the gravity and denseness of an inscribed piece of information. This denotes the profound difference between photography and painting, whose connection with the concept of immediacy is more problematic. You started studying painting, but you then found that photography was more suitable for you.

JM: In the immediacy with which photography gripped I understood in a flash that there was space in this medium for a kind of growth and self-development, and elevated skills. Painting is something you have to learn (you learn how to mix the paints, stretch the canvas, etc.); a lot of steps are physical steps, and then you have to learn to develop your subjects on the canvas. Painting has a lot of old, guild-like learning to it, whereas the camera works in an instant. We can see it even more today with the smartphone—people pick it up, press the button and they have the picture! I think early on I saw a vast capacity opening in front of me, and it really drew me in, and I felt like I was on the right path.

LB: In the early years, you regularly photographed in the company of other photographers: Tony RayJones, right from the very beginning, then Garry Winogrand, with whom you shared a similar background, and then Tod Papageorge, who eventually joined you and Garry. Was there a reason for this? How did it happen, and what benefits did you get from photographing with others?

JM: It happened naturally with Tony [see pictures nos. 1 and 2]; I met him by total accident. On the very first day I began making photographs, I brought the rolls to a lab on 56th street, off Fifth avenue. The next day I went back, and they gave me my two boxes of photographs and I laid them out on the lightbox. In came another young guy, sort-of my age, he got his pictures and he too laid them out on the lightbox. We were standing two feet apart from each other, looking at our own pictures. At some point I said something, and he said something and we started looking at each other’s pictures. We introduced ourselves: we were both art directors (or graphic designers, or whatever we called ourselves then), and we were both shooting in color. Obviously, we were both new at this, and we said, “Why don’t we meet and go out and take a walk together?”. Just two young guys having a little company on the street for whatever inspiration we might give each other. And that really turned into a two-year steady shooting session with Tony.

LB: How often would you see each other in a week?

JM: Well, he was working, so he was free on the weekends until he left his job at Columbia records, and went to do some freelance work for the magazines Opera News and Car and Driver.

LB: You shot many parades together. I guess it must have been an easy and fun subject for two young enthusiasts.

JM: We started shooting in the parades because we both found ourselves to be shy [see pictures nos. 3 and 4]. The parades allow one to hide in the teeming crowds without having to necessarily photograph the parade itself. We photographed the clusters of people, which if you look at them from the right perspective, they look like they could be in any street, they do not necessarily look like a crowd looking at a parade. That was a training ground for us. We looked at the slides in my little apartment on the upper-west side, and analyzed them for their exposure, for their sharpness, for how close we got or should have gotten, for what our timing was like, etc. We were taking apart the attitude that we worked with, and our physical distancing, and our abilities to overcome shyness and get closer to people. So, in a sense we were creating strategies for ourselves on how to work on the street and learn to be comfortable. That was a big hurdle to overcome, you know. When you are first going out on the street, you don’t know what to expect, you don’t even know how to behave. I was twenty-four, he was twenty-two… we were kids!

LB: The shyness does not come out in the pictures, though, because you were often really close to people, sometimes right in their face. You must have learned quickly how to overcome your shyness. JM: We learned by breaking those boundaries, trying to see how close we could get to make the photograph. Then, when we got the pictures back and realized, “Wow, they didn’t say anything to us, nobody got mad”, we learned that we could use that same attitude to get close again. You know, these little bursts of the taste of being on the street are so savory, so delicious, that you really want to do it again and again. I think it was as much the desire to be out there and see how daring and risky we could become, as well as having the pictures that would come out of it. That kind of work with Tony was formative, and then of course we were looking at our pictures together to create some vocabulary to talk about them, because we didn’t have any! There was no language available to us then. We didn’t know what to say besides “That’s good”, “That’s nice”, “That’s interesting”.

LB: You were learning the alphabet of photography, both from a visual and a verbal point of view. JM: It’s true!

LB: Then, in late 1962, you met Garry Winogrand [see pictures nos. 5 and 6]. How did it happen? JM: We met on a train. I was coming home from the Bronx, where I went to see my family, and Garry was up seeing his mother. We lived only one or two stops from each other. We didn’t know it, but that was our Bronx life. On the train, we were sitting across the aisle from each other, Garry looked at me, I looked at him, and I said, “You’re a friend of Harry Gordon’s, right? I see you on the street all the time”. And he said, “Yes, you used to work for Harry. Are you still working for Harry?” I said “No”. Garry said, “I thought so because I see you on the street!” [laughter]. Anyway, we both got off at the same stop and started walking to our respective apartments and he said, “Come up sometime and I’ll show you some pictures. Maybe we’ll meet tomorrow, and we’ll go out shooting”. He was Garry Winogrand, but he wasn’t famous then, he was just a guy who was making a living shooting advertising now and then, and he had been a magazine photographer for some of the smaller, pulpier magazines. He wasn’t like a Life photographer.

LB: He referred to himself as a hired gun. JM: Yes, he was a hired gun. Anything to keep the income coming in, so that he could raise his family. One of the things that Garry said to me, early on, was so important and remains a building block of my behavior. He said, “Look, the first thing is that you gotta make a living, you gotta take care of your responsibilities. Then you make photographs”. So, however you can make a living, do that first, you know, it’s the only way to be free. A few years later I started to figure out I could make a living by shooting ads, because I had been in the game long enough to know the language.

LB: What about Tony? Were you still seeing him at that point?

JM: Yeah, but by 1965 Tony was already heading back to England, because his visa was up, and Garry and I just fell into our own rhythm. Garry was getting divorced and had two children that he had to pick up every other day after school, so that he could make dinner for them, have them sleep at his place and then the next day they went to their mother. Garry didn’t know what to do with them, basically, he could cook only one thing, and that was steak with creamed spinach and mashed potatoes. That’s all he could cook, and that’s what his kids ate every night they were at the house. He needed help, and my wife at the time, Vivian, and I lived so close by we would come over to help Garry with dinner and with the kids. We were like uncles and aunts to them. He had a girl and a boy, Laurie and Ethan. We fell into a rhythm in which we all just kind of hung out together. We had dinner, we put the kids to bed, we’d sit around, we’d look at photographs, we’d talk about photography, politics, life. It wasn’t all about photography, it was about friendliness and companionship. Then it became a routine, one of us would call the other, and we would just meet and hit the streets. Usually it was Garry, because he was much more a nervous energy-pacing-shaking kind of guy. If he was sitting in a chair his legs would be drumming and he would be rocking, smoking, and drinking. He called, sometimes really early, and we would meet at ‘the greasy spoon’ on 96th street. It wasn’t called The Greasy Spoon, by the way, that’s what we called it because everything had a layer of grease on it [laughter].

LB: How was his apartment? I read that it was really messy, with boxes of photographs piling up everywhere.

JM: It was a big three-bedroom apartment on the upper-west side, on 93rd street, just off Central Park. It was stacked, the boxes were all along from the hallway into the living room, and even in his bedroom. Stacks around a meter high, they were Kodak yellow boxes, 11x14”, 250 sheet boxes. Often, on top of the stacks there were piles of pictures that could not fit the boxes, but that he kept there because they belonged to that particular set of printing. The first time he showed me photographs, he just said “Look at these!” and he handed me a stack of what must have been two-hundred pictures. He went to take a drink or make himself a coffee, and I remember sitting there and flipping through these pictures and… it was everything! Not all the pictures were good, and the prints were not perfect, by any means. They were good and readable, but they were not the best prints you can make. He knocked these things out in a couple of long nights in the darkroom every week, so that he had something to look at.

LB: He was perhaps not terribly interested in producing objects that would look good in a museum. Printing fine art pictures is a time-consuming activity that would have kept him off the street. Work prints were probably good enough for his purpose. Is there anything in this respect that you think might have influenced you, or that you learned from him?

JM: I learned something about appetite, and the variety of things one could see, and how important it was to have your own reference material to look at, so that from the abundance you could distill the essential elements that would show you the direction you needed to go in. I was shooting Kodachrome, and projected all 36 slides on the wall, but I was young and I hadn’t yet sufficiently created an identity for myself. I was hungry to be out on the streets and shooting, but I wasn’t voracious like Garry was.

LB: You would project your slides because the printing process was too complicated and expensive for color back then, whereas black and white film allowed you to have good prints quickly, and it was much cheaper. There is a huge difference between looking at an immaterial image and looking at a printed picture, especially for a young photographer.

JM: I think I really understood that only after seeing Garry’s prints. I needed to see the prints, their tangibility was important, and the only way to make prints was to shoot black and white. Color was an impossibility in the sixties. With color, it would take fifty minutes to make a print with filter packs, and there were 11 steps of chemistry. You really had to have a darkroom that was temperature controlled, and all of that. I had nothing, I had no darkroom. So, I built myself a black and white darkroom, and I got a Leitz Autofocus enlarger. It was automatic, it went up and down and was always in focus, no matter what you did. It was the king of enlargers, I have to say, it was one of the most beautiful tools you’ll ever see in your life.

LB: Did you build your darkroom at home?

JM: Yes, I had a dry darkroom. I had to process my films in the bathroom, and then I had the enlarger set up in the little alcove bedroom that we had, which I made dark in daylight. I would print dry in there, then put the print in a box, go into the bathroom, get on my knees and soup the print in the bathtub, where I had the three developing trays.

LB: It sounds pretty laborious, but it satiated your appetite, I’m sure. JM: It surely did. What was interesting in seeing the abundance of Garry’s pictures, was recognizing how many risks he was taking on the street. These were things that I had already begun to see on my own, but that color was often too slow to capture. So, in a way, that served my appetite too, and my particular way of looking at things helped me make the leap from color to black and white. I really got the call immediately!

LB: I know that when you talk about the photographic risks Garry was taking, you mean that he was photographing unexpected things, things almost invisible to photography in those years, and that he was photographing them in new and unexpected ways, pushing the boundaries of the language. I think that part of the risk was also the photographic gesture, though, which was a crucial aspect for both of you. I am not referring just to the gestures of the people photographed, which are meaningful, but also to the act of photographing itself. You see it from the pictures, the photographs are the result of the way you move, and how you navigate the street. They are the product of your physicality and dynamism. Did you learn anything from the way Garry moved on the street?

JM: Well, you know, I was more of an athlete than Garry. I played baseball, I swam, I was on teams in high-school and in college, I danced. I was very physical, it was a natural thing for me. When I started working the parades with Tony, all of the physical gestures people did were already a signal for me (you know, if somebody reaches up to do something with their hair, or adjust their hat, or lean forward to grab a kid by the collar and pull them back from the cops on horseback) it wasn’t something that I got from Garry. I think what I got from Garry was the idea that all of it was photographable, that life itself was so complex that all the little interactions are the stuff of street photography. And the prints showed that to me almost more than Garry’s gestures and movements.

LB: Garry’s presence on the street was definitely more noticeable than yours. I have seen how subtle and quick you are when you photograph, still to this day. You have ways of photographing people without disturbing them, or even without being seen. I know you are not the kind of photographer that aims at provoking a reaction in your subjects.

JM: No, no, I’m stealthy, and I’m fast. You know, when I played baseball, I played third base, which is called the hot corner, because any ball that’s hit along the third baseline is powerfully hit. The ball comes fast, and you have to move quickly. You have ten feet of space between you and the short stop and the third base bag. You are operating in that space, and the action is concentrated and fast. It taught me a lot about position, intuition, and how to move as soon as you hear the crack of the bat, and you get a sense of where the ball is going. You have to move fast so that when that ball comes your glove is right there. I think I learned about the street from sports, you know, at the heart of it.

LB: This metaphor is revealing of how deeply American, and more specifically New Yorker, your understanding of photography was. The idea of street photography as a vigorous, fragmented, swarming expression of urban life would not have been possible anywhere else in the sixties, I think.

JM: I totally agree, Fifth avenue was a boulevard of dreams. You could see the high and the low, on the street, at the same time—you saw beauty and tragedy. It was dramatic, theatrical and unexpected, and it seemed to be the perfect place to play the game of sight. You could hunt on that street, and disappear in the crowd. Back then—this is a question I have been asked a lot of times—there was an innocence, an overall general public innocence—“Why would anybody wanna photograph me?”—so photographers could really disappear in the crowd and no one gave them a second look. We would not give a signal, like holding up your smartphone in front of your face. The gesture with the camera would be quick—up and down, a subtle sliding motion. You could not even see the flash of the camera when the photographer brought it up to their face and brought it down again. It was so fast, and that’s because with black and white you can work at 1/1000 of a second, at f/8 or f/11 or something like that, and get the entire depth of field. So, the photographers knew that if they could bring up the camera, pass it in front of their eye and bring it down again, they would be invisible.

LB: I know this is an old question, but are these quick gestures the reason why Winogrand’s pictures often had a tilted horizon? At least at the beginning, that is, before they became a sort of signature of his style.

JM: That’s exactly it. When I bring the Leica up, I use my right eye to look in the viewfinder, while my left eye keeps watching everything else. Because I’m right-handed, when I bring the camera up my framing is more rectilinear. Garry looked through his left-eye, so when he brought the camera up, he had to pass it across his face, and turn his head to look in the viewfinder. So, often the camera had a little bit of a tilt to it. It was due to part of the speed of the action.

LB: It must not have been long before he decided to use the tilt on purpose, because it added dynamism to the pictures and it was a recognizable style.

JM: I would say he accepted that condition, not that he did it on purpose. I think you come to like what you make, but I don’t think he wanted to make pictures that were canted that way. Jay Maisel once bumped into me and Garry on the street and I remember him saying, “Hey Garry, I saw your show the other day”, and as he said that he comically tilted his head over to one side [laughter]. They were old buddies, you know. They didn’t see each other that much, but they were old friends from the magazine days. There’s an underappreciated photographer—Jay Maisel! He’s got a lot of early work in black and white that was sensational. He then started to do commercial work, and he got really good and famous, and that became his main work. He didn’t differentiate between the so-called serious work and the work in which he made very colorful, graphic images. It’s a pity, because there was a guy who had it, and it upset him that he wasn’t taken seriously. I remember he once called me at some point, when Cape Light came out, and he said, “How can someone like you, ten years younger than me, get a book and everything? What is it?”. “You know—I said—Jay, we both work in advertising, but you don’t differentiate between your advertising and your personal work. For me, I work enough to make a living for my family, and I spend the rest of the time for myself. That’s the trade-off”.

LB: There were probably quite a few photographers that you could say got lost in that way, not being able to differentiate between personal and professional work.

JM: That’s what happened to Saul Leiter early on. He and Garry were friends, and there were a bunch of other guys all around the same age. When fashion came along, it stole them, and they started to like it. They liked being with the women, and making the money, and having their pictures in the magazines. Suddenly you’re hot in some way.

LB: There were also a few photographers who managed to do strong commercial work and have it recognized as having artistic value, people like Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, for example. JM: They did, they overcame that way of being boxed in. Not a lot of other photographers did, although I am sure many thought they were artists, and they were happy doing commercial work. Now, if you dig into their files, a lot of their work looks very good, because it fits the time, it fits the sixties, and they were doing very edgy stuff, in terms of fashion. But I want you to know that, even in my young circle, we didn’t take Avedon seriously as an artist; he was a commercial fashion photographer. I don’t think he took himself that seriously either. Avedon lent his studio to Alexey Brodovitch, to use as a classroom. So, when Tony Ray-Jones and I went to study with Brodovitch, we were in Dick Avedon’s studio, which he shared with a guy named Hiro, who was a great still-life photographer. When Brodovitch got sick, Avedon took over for six weeks or something like that. He wasn’t talking about photography in terms of what, say, John Szarkowski was offering in MoMA, he was talking about how you make a living. He thought everybody in that class wanted to be fashion photographers or commercial photographers; really, he was trying to solve those problems. It was only in later years, in the seventies maybe, that John Szarkowski—who was looking at all the genres: newspaper photography, evidentiary photography, industrial photography, primitive photography, etc.—started looking at the world of fashion to see who was elevating the work to something higher, and he picked Penn and Avedon. He recognized them in this respect and, in a sense, he gave them their artistic future.

LB: Since you mention John Szarkowski, let me ask you about how he influenced you. The work he did for three decades as director of the Department of Photography at MoMA was instrumental for the growth of the art of photography. You were among those for whom he was a mentor. [see picture no. 7] JM: I began in 1962, the year John took over the Museum of Modern Arts’ Photography Department after Steichen. Prior to John coming there, Steichen’s shows were flabby by comparison. They were historical or they were like “The Family of Man”. They were somewhat sentimental; their ideas were not necessarily photographic ideas. Steichen was a commercial photographer, a fashion photographer, and also the head of War Photography in the Pacific theater. The US government made him that, so that the record could be kept, but it was more like propaganda. He was overseeing documentary photography. But when John took over, he tried to define from the very beginning what photography was, and what it could be. His earliest show was “The Photographer’s Eye”.2 Right away he set out the structures he thought were important for us to view photography. He was educating the public right from the beginning. Then he followed through with shows that introduced to us the great photographers of the past. He brought them into the present: people like Brassaï, Kertész, Sander, Atget, Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, etc. He showed women photographers and men photographers. He showed Civil War work, and Crimean War work. He was making an overview of photography, which gave him a platform to then insert contemporary photographers and contemporary exhibitions into the dialogue he was setting up.

LB: His influence was huge, and he laid new ground for the developing and understanding of the medium. His work has been fundamental in changing the perception of photography by the art world, and in broadening its public.

JM: John came at a time when pop art had moved abstract expressionism off the center of the stage. To me it was shocking! I thought that abstract expressionism was the highpoint of art, that you could come from the Renaissance to here, and now big pieces of colors, movements, and energy were enough to make a painting. Why do I want to look at a can of Campbell soup? I thought that art had been kidnapped by advertising, but at the same time I was working in advertising, so I understood the mechanics, and the appeal of it. The territory of photography benefitted from pop art, because it made things from ordinary life become iconic images.

May 27—August 23, 1964. A online: <https://www.moma.org/calendar/

LB: Szarkowski was a catalyst who attracted fresh energy and new ideas around him. JM: I turned from art history and painting to photography. I didn’t know anything about it, but it caught me and I know there were others like me. The zeitgeist of the period in photography was a very small and narrow flame, but it was intense. John was holding the flame up, and a few of us were flittering around it. By learning from him and putting work out, the flame got a little brighter and was now being held by different artists: by Garry Winogrand, by Lee Friedlander, by Diane Arbus, by Tod Papageorge, by Bill Gedney, by Ralph Gibson, and by me. A coterie of young photographers became students of John’s expression of what photography could have been, and created a kind of dialogue in the medium between them, and with John and his shows. My understanding of his tenure at MoMA was that if he hadn’t been that broad and ‘catholic’ person (in terms of how comprehensive his interests were), we wouldn’t have the photography that we have today. The rise of interest in it throughout the seventies, the eighties, and into the nineties, was soaring. It just kept on growing, and galleries started opening, and museums started making departments, and schools started offering photography courses. John Szarkowski was the turning point of this process. I talked to so many people who said to me, “Well, you know, I saw John Szarkowski’s shows and my life was changed”.

LB: The circle around Szarkowski widened quickly, and included also people like Henry Wessel, who was a street photographer, but was also part of the “New Topographics” group. JM: I loved Henry’s work. He and I felt that we had probably a closer connection in sympathies about our work, than anybody else. Even though we didn’t spend time with each other over the years—he lived in California, I lived in New York—every time we saw each other’s work or communicated, we knew that something about our sensibility was close, closer than we were to anybody else, although I have to say that there was a time when Tod and I felt that same kind of deep connection. It always saddened me that Henry and I never spent time going out shooting together.

LB: Do you remember how you met Szarkowski?

JM: It was Garry Winogrand who introduced me to him. We entered MoMA by a side entrance, because John’s little office was in a brownstone mansion adjacent to the museum. I took my little box of pictures and John went through it and he was humming and holding the prints up, and then he would give me a look or a wink or something like that, and put it down. Then he would talk about some things he saw, trying to hear what I had to say, but I didn’t have much to say, because it was all new to me. I’d only been doing it for less than a year. There were some pictures that he really liked. One of them in particular, of a man behind a fence talking into a phone box on a pole. [see picture no. 8]

LB: He liked it to the point that he included it in the 1964 exhibition “The Photographer’s Eye”. It was the first time one of your pictures was shown publicly. You started shooting less than two years before, and MoMA was already showing one of your photos. It was a courageous image, and Szarkowski understood it. JM: He asked me, “Why did you make this photograph?”, I said, “It was surprising to me as I could barely see this guy, he was like a bear in a cage. All I saw was the sunlight and the cross hatches in the shadows. He was visible and invisible”. I can see John now, I can see the smile crossing his face. He said, “Yeah, you know there’s more to say about it, but your instinct was for the right reason”. I thought, “Wow, my instinct. He validated my instinct”. Over time I learned that John’s method would be to draw the photographer out and try to help you clearly say what it was, besides “It’s an interesting picture”, “It’s a strong picture”, “I like the composition”. John wanted more, and by being patient with all us ‘Young Turks’ that were coming in, he helped us to see that there was a vocabulary. When I heard him speak, or when I read what he wrote, my mind was on fire. I really believe that with the hundred or so shows that he did in his time—evidentiary photography, landscape photography, portrait photography, news photography, fashion photography… even my pictures from a moving car!—he was willing to try on the range of photography being expressed by the new generation. He put work out there in small shows. He did not have a big space, he had a small room that could take about forty photographs. Every six weeks or so he would put up a new show in that room. He was moving through it [snaps his fingers rapidly]. He would have eight to ten shows a year there. Only about once a year could he get a bigger space.

LB: Szarkowski’s work attracted also some criticism from the photography world. It was almost unavoidable, for somebody in his position. Not everyone agreed with his decisions, and in particular with the selection of artists he endorsed.

JM: John’s interests covered a wide range of photography. He himself was a photographer and used an 8x10” view camera to photograph architecture and landscape. He made beautiful work, if you have ever seen his work on Louis Sullivan, it’s really exquisite, thoughtful work. But he also loved the energy of street photography, because here he was in New York, and he was meeting it head-on in the persona of guys like Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander, and me, and Simpson Kalisher, and William Klein, and Robert Frank. These are people who played a role in his developing vocabulary.

LB: He did not limit his interest to the photography of the present, though, as he often drew attention to photographers of the past.

JM: Yes, he was also looking at Charles Marville, Eugène Atget, Dorothea Lange, the FSA, and Édouard Boubat. He was moving through an arc, and a lot of that stuff is personal work in the world at large, so it might fulfill the heading of ‘street photography’ or ‘real-life photography’. But then Ansel Adams played a big role, and so did Edward Weston and the whole f/64 group. He was interested in The Photo League, and people like Jacob Riis, who were socially conscious photographers depicting poverty in New York City and trying to bring about social change. He introduced us to Weegee, and a lot of other work, and I thought the range was really surprising. I saw things that I never would have expected, and I didn’t know existed. He could show us Ray Metzker from Philadelphia, Josef Koudelka doing the gypsies, things that were sort of Magnum-like but they didn’t behave like a magazine story. He introduced us to Paul Strand in a fresh way. I never saw John as narrow, and it could be because I was in the group of people that he showed. I saw him as really broad and expanding the range of photographs, particularly in the 19th century. He showed the guys who photographed in the

Civil War, who the government then hired to go on expeditions out west; like Timothy O’Sullivan, and William Henry Jackson. John was showing us these works, and he developed the collection for MoMA. Sure, he had a few favorites, but they didn’t have a lot of shows. A couple of shows over thirty years or inclusion in some big group shows which had to be, because they were markers of their time.

LB: Aside from Szarkowski’s influence, you also had a chance to develop your skills by comparing and discussing work with your peers. In the mid-sixties, Garry Winogrand held gatherings in his apartment, where you and other people would meet to discuss photography. How many of you took part to this and what happened during the meetings?

JM: It was the beginning of 1965. Garry wasn’t a very verbal person about photography then, and he was challenged by Szarkowski’s erudite way of expressing himself about photography. I think we were all beginning to feel the challenge that we had to rise to the level of our teacher somehow. I think Garry felt that if he could make a course, he could perhaps hear his own answers and responses. He was looking to find his voice. Garry was quick witted and sharp, but he didn’t have an academic education. This was an opportunity for him to finesse his thinking, but no one signed up for the class. He advertised it in the Village voice, a local newspaper, and no one showed up, so a bunch of his friends decided to take it. We took it just to be there for him, so we could talk about photography. It’s not that Garry was going to teach anything. He would direct our discussion.

LB: Who attended the meetings?

JM: My wife Vivian came, Garry’s girlfriend Judy Teller came, two art directors, Sheila Metzner and Jeff Metzner came (they worked with Garry on jobs, and I worked with them too), and then Tod Papageorge—I don’t know exactly when he came to New York, but in January 1965 I had a show at the Underground Gallery, and Tod came to the show and met Garry and me there. Garry invited him to come up to participate to these conversations. I don’t remember anybody else coming, I have the feeling there was one guy who came later on, but I can’t remember his name. We would meet at Garry’s home and talk about photographs, and then Garry would say, “maybe next week we should all photograph…”— and he gave us a subject—or “bring in something so that we could talk about it next week”.

LB: Did you feel like being part of a movement? Garry, Tod, and you shared an interest for a new way of documenting, and John Szarkowski’s guidance was pushing you and other artists towards a common direction.

JM: I don’t think that we thought that we were part of a movement as a group, I think that Tod and I, who were close in age, understood that we were new energy, new photographic energy. Tod had wanted to be a poet or a writer, and he’s an eloquent writer, (I always expected him to be the Curator at MoMA after John). I had wanted to be a painter, and here we were, making photographs. Something about photography was really engaging, and street photography was a wonderful jazz-like part of it. I think we were caught up in that, but I don’t think that we had a mental view that we were revolutionaries. I think we just were poets trying to make a little bit of poetry out of everyday life. We didn’t see photography as being a victor in the game of art, because at that time it was just thought of as a low craft.

LB: The gap between the art and the photography worlds was enormous.

JM: Almost unclimbable.

LB: Even despite MoMA and John Szarkowski’s work?

JM: Well, he’d only been there since 1962. He was finding his own voice as well, and we were there alongside of him, listening and trying to interpret and express what photography meant to us—I’ll tell you where there was a feeling of movement. In those years, there were a lot of photographers who were downtown, Ralph Gibson being one of the main names. For the most part, they were more directorial. We, uptown guys, were experiential. We were more interested in what happened to us in the street, what went on today, how could we keep up with it, how could we perceive it as it happened, rather than scripting what kind of imagery we would have liked it to look like. I think Ralph and his friends were probably more influenced by Man Ray, and that kind of photography, whereas we were influenced by Robert Frank. Gibson loved Frank, he knew Frank better than I did, but I think that his photography departed from Frank’s towards the poetical. Sometimes we would meet together and there were always the uptown guys against the downtown guys, because we had a different stance. We would argue and discuss photography from opposing points of view. There was no bitterness or anything, it was just a matter of different values. Photography holds them all.

LB: I am interested in the use you made of the term ‘documentary photography’. Is this one of the lenses through which you saw your work? Did you make a distinction between documentary and art photography? JM: I don’t think that any of us thought that we were documentary photographers, but I can only speak for myself. I did have endless conversations with Tod and Garry about it. It wasn’t what we were doing; documentary photographers at that time were people who would photograph, say, the freedom movements, or if you went to photograph steel workers, or the coal miners, or if you were doing some kind of a story. Garry worked for magazines before he started doing advertising. He did stories on sports, and boxers, or backstage at the striptease clubs, things like that. I don’t think he saw that as documentary either, he would do a story for a magazine, but he was also making pictures for himself. Robert Altman too worked for some of the magazines, but I don’t believe that he saw himself as a documentary photographer. That was storytelling for another purpose because, who could afford to go off and do those things, and support themselves? There was only one guy I knew who could do that, his name was Ken Heyman, he was a wealthy guy, and about ten years older than me. Ken once did a whole big shoot on the South in the early sixties, but he supported himself with family money I believe. So, no, I don’t think that any of us saw ourselves as documentary photographers. And we would loath to say we were artists. We were just photographers who were trying to find the poetics of the medium.

LB: Was the term ‘street photography’ used at the time?

JM: It wasn’t used and, this is going to sound crazy, I know, but I think Tony and I may have been the ones to make it a contemporary expression. Garry hated it, when I would say that we were street photographers he would say [imitates Winogrand’s hoarse voice] “I’m not a street photographer, I’m a photographer!”. But when people would ask us what we were doing, I would say, “Well, we go out on the street and we photograph whatever happens on the street. I guess we are street photographers, we photograph street life!”. I tried to trace the first usage of ‘street photographer’ as a saying, but I couldn’t find it. I know that that’s what I called myself, because I had to tell people what I did. When I said “I’m a photographer”, they would ask, “Do you do bar mitzvahs and weddings?”, “No, I don’t do that”, “Then what do you photograph?” “Well, I walk around the streets, whatever is interesting I photograph!”.

LB: There wasn’t much space for photography as a form of art in those days, was there? You would make a living by doing commercial work, advertising, or you would be a photojournalist, and you would do your personal work on the side. Very few photographers made a living as artists. JM: Well, you know, there were Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston, and the f/64 group, and Steichen, and Stieglitz. These people were art photographers. We saw those people as earlier models, independent and personal, searching for a voice. Edward Weston, and Tina Modotti, and Imogen Cunningham, and Walker Evans, and others, gave us the sense that there was an artistic lineage, or an artistic ‘department’ of photography that was all about self-expression. We didn’t always believe in pictorialism, or in the preciousness of a lot of the photographers from Stieglitz’s gallery. Still, they were making works for themselves that they hoped to sell, and they showed them in art surroundings, sometimes museums did show their works. We saw them as models, even though we separated ourselves from them because we were not working with large format cameras, and we didn’t have all those beautiful processes like selenium toning, and all that stuff that was so arcane. We were just making simple prints. In fact, I’ll tell you, Robert Frank made relatively ordinary prints, and spotty too! We saw Frank’s prints, when they were exhibited, and it was like, “Oh, so we don’t have to make perfect prints like Edward Weston!”. We could make these ‘rude’ prints that expressed and described what it was we saw, without being salon prints.

LB: Maybe things were slightly different with social documentary in the thirties and forties. Despite being oriented towards the social, it was not perceived as merely documentary photography. Of course, I am thinking about Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Walker Evans, etc. JM: Of course, and they were the FSA photographers, who were out to document the effect of the depression and the Dust Bowl on America. Even if it was seen in the large context of a social calamity, their work was individual enough. The work of people like Russell Lee, John Vachon, and Ben Shahn, who was an artist who became a photographer, was incredibly personal, even though they may have been made in the service of a social program. I never really read them as being documentary photographers, they were artists who went out to work in that period. They produced bodies of work that gave us nourishment and encouragement, and they were fluid enough to be seen from an artistic point of view rather than only as documentary. We thought we were a continuation of that way of seeing.

LB: In 1967 John Szarkowski curated a show called “New Documents”,3 which included photographs by Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander. It was a seminal exhibition, a turning point for your generation. What Szarkowski wrote in the introduction to the show, goes in a similar direction to what you just said, “A new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends”. The three photographers included in the show were not seeking to advance a social cause, nonetheless I think that the continuity with the past generation is clear.

JM: Yes, I think it’s true. A document is a statement about something, and sometimes you put your feelings or your observation about the time into the document. I don’t think that any of them thought of themselves as documentary photographers, though.

LB: Is it true that Szarkowski wanted to include you in the exhibition?

JM: Yes, I still have all the pictures on my computer! I was going to be in Europe in 1966-1967, so I wasn’t going to be around that year. I showed John ninety pictures, and he made a selection from them. I had only been photographing about three and a half years at the time, and I remember thinking, “It’s Garry, Lee, and Diane. They have ten years more than me in photography, do I deserve to be part of this?”. I probably should have said yes at the time, but I was about to go away. That trip was very important to me, and I didn’t want to undo it, so I backed out of the show. It was a mistake probably, because it became an important turning point, and historical exhibition.

LB: Yet, some fifty years after your generation’s work, street photography still meets resistance in being accepted as a form of art. Many see it as casually made, I guess, or they can’t perceive the craft.

JM: People often still cannot understand the artistic value of a street photograph, because it doesn’t require a studio, getting material, setting it up, constructing it, painting it, and finally having an object. Street photography is so fluid that it seems easy, and so it never had—and to this stage still doesn’t have—equivalent value to object-oriented artworks. All of my dealers, in every era, couldn’t sell street photography, because people didn’t see where the artistry was, and I had the best dealers: Lee Witkin, Danny Wolf, Bonni Benrubi, even Ariel Meyerowitz, and now Howard Greenberg. The perception that we photographers had back then, that a brilliantly, caught moment was going to strike it rich for us, simply wasn’t of value. People would say, “It’s a picture of people on the street, anybody could do that”. It was incredibly frustrating. All of us who knew the hard work that took it to make these pictures, and understand the inherent poetics of them, would recognize that. But the art world would not, and to this day they still don’t.

LB: It’s not a matter of aesthetic, I think, because there are photographers like Eggleston, for example, who had commercial success, despite the ‛casual’ look of their work.

JM: One of the reasons why Eggleston’s work gets bought, is that he’s basically making still-lifes. He’s photographing objects. His subjects are recognizable. Whereas street photographs require a different kind of willingness to look-in on, and wonder about the spirit of modern life. They are about how quickly something appears and disappears. They are peak moments, they are musical and poetic fragmentary things, and they are dynamic. Whereas something sitting on a table, is on a table, is on a table, is on a table…. It doesn’t do anything. A street photograph has a charge to it, in a different way, but I think it never really got there because the print’s scale was never big enough. Street photography deserves to be big.

LB: How big do you think you need to print a street photograph, in order to experience its charge fully?

JM: Even if it’s a meter and a half, when you look at it from across the room, it’s almost like you are looking at people there, because scale is everything on the street. But that’s not the way photography was collected. How many people have room in their houses for big art? Believe me, if I made a show of street work, and all the pictures were three meters and up, and there were forty of them in the room, you would have such a feeling when you walk around… each picture will draw you in, there would be so much to look at! I can’t get a museum to be interested. I’ll have to be dead for my daughter to convince somebody at some point in the future that Joel meant these pictures to be printed one and a half meters long.

LB: Perhaps nowadays that we’re used to seeing miniature images on phone screens, such a show would have even more of an impact. Have you really never had an exhibition with only large-scale prints of street photographs?

JM: Once, in 2010, I worked with Hewlett Packard on a show of big-scale street photographs, to show off their large-format printers. I had their 44” printer, and I made eight or ten of these street pictures, which were about one and a half meters long. They were sensational: they drew such crowds! HP gave me a whole section near their booth. They built it like a gallery: you could come into this gallery, and they were huge. Museums won’t do it, but these commercial guys, just to show the quality of their printers, put these pictures up.

LB: I think the difference is that, in a relatively small print, you can embrace the whole frame with a single glance, you can take in the entire space with your eyes. Whereas a huge print can have a disorienting or dazzling effect.

JM: What happens is you become part of the picture. When you stand next to it, at that scale, you are another onlooker. You can feel it because the people who are appearing next to you in the picture are nearly your scale. You are in an almost one to one relationship, and that gives you a way of entering the experience that is different from looking at it in a book. When you look at an image in a book, you have to read it as a picture, whereas the other way you have it closer to experience. It’s flat, but it still got a volume or scale to it that surrounds you.

LB: Do you think that there are particular qualities that a picture requires in order to work on a largescale print, or can any picture be blown up?

JM: I think one would be surprised at what works big. Some pictures might just not work, they might kind of overstate themselves, but there are humble or simple pictures that at a large scale might move you. I tried it myself, when I did Legacy, the show on the New York City parks, in 2009.4 I had half of the Museum of the City of New York, and I had giant rooms. I made floor to ceiling prints, so that the rooms became the woods and the rivers and the wild spaces of the parks. When you stood up against

4 In 2006, the pictures it was like you were there, in the real place. Maybe those prints worked because they stated themselves in a powerful re-enactment of reality.

LB: Large-scale prints work as an amplification, which forces you to look more attentively at things. JM: Yes, the scale amplifies the assemblage of meanings that are built into the picture. It’s like going to a concert and listening to music in a great hall, or sitting in your room and turning your stereo up until everything in the room shakes. The music is bigger than it was originally, and it gets under your skin, it moves you, and vibrates the organs of your body. When you print a picture really big, and amplify all the content, you see people’s clothing moving on their bodies, you see the texture of the material of concrete and glass and steel and skin and cars and dirt, and all of this stuff becomes expressive beyond what it is in the smaller version of the picture. That’s what I wanted! I wanted to make the heat of a day come off of the sidewalks of New York City, and make you feel the texture of people’s clothing, and sunlight on people’s skin, the density of summer air, and the weight of shadows. I am hoping that in my lifetime, what I have left, I will find either a museum, or a gallery, or a collector willing to go the whole way with me, and make a show of works up to that scale.