New York photographer Joel Meyerowitz is fond of saying that he doesn`t want to master his art. ”I just want to be in the grip of it.”
In an introduction to the color images in his 1978 book, ”Cape Light”
(New York Graphic Society, Boston, $24.95), Meyerowitz described taking a photograph as falling in love for an instant with a subject that is about to be lost forever. ”What you feel in that instant, that glimpse of something just out of reach, is what tells you to make a photograph,” he states in the book.
That fleeting glimpse beckons him to the color portraits as well. ”If you think you can observe someone`s nature in an instant then you can photograph it,” he says.
Meyerowitz, 47, will discuss his work Tuesday at a free public lecture at the Art Institute of Chicago.
”He is absolutely one of the best” photographers working today, says David Travis, curator of photography at the Art Institute.
Meyerowitz started as a street photographer in New York City, catching life on the run with a 35 mm. camera.
He tells with relish the story of the day in 1962 when he decided to switch careers and become a photographer. He was an art director for a New York advertising agency at the time and had been sent out to observe an assignment being shot for the agency by documentary photographer Robert Frank. ”I didn`t even know who Frank was, but I was astonished by his behavior. He was so swift and decisive and balletic. He was magic,” Meyerowitz says.
He quit his agency job that same afternoon, borrowed a camera, then bought one and ”started dancing like Frank in front of life.”
As he worked, he frequently encountered Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus and other photographers pursuing the beat of life on the streets. One day, he found Henri Cartier-Bresson taking photographs on the streets of New York. The novice introduced himself to the master. They had coffee. Meyerowitz practiced the yo-yo motion Cartier-Bresson had perfected to sweep a camera tied to his wrist in place for a picture.
Unlike most of his peers, Meyerowitz took his first photographs in color but later turned to black and white. In 1970, he won his first Guggenheim Fellowship to travel America and photograph ”leisure time.”
He switched to a view camera and landscapes of Cape Cod and Provincetown, Mass., in 1976 to photograph the lush yet everyday color scenes found in
”Cape Light.” His work began to extend into portraiture, coming full circle, in a sense, back to the street photography.
”Then I was stealing the portrait,” he says. ”You can be a private, almost shy, photographer with a 35 mm. camera. But with a view camera, you`re very visible. You`re more humanized. My response was I began to talk to people, to make a portrait here, a portrait there.”
But even with 45 pounds of equipment and the upside down perspective of the world through an 8-by-10-inch Deardorff camera, Meyerowitz is still trying to capture the moment when he sees ”something deep flicker out” from perfect strangers. As a photographer, ”I try to bring them to that place again,” he says.
It`s not quite as ethereal as it sounds, however. The flickering essence often embodies sheer physical charisma. Meyerowitz is drawn, for instance, toward photographing young girls poised between womanhood and childhood or redheads whose skin is covered with the natural ”jewelry” of freckles. He likes to photograph mothers and daughters, reading with the camera the features ”they share genetically that will turn the daughter into the mother,” Meyerowitz says.
In one photograph, a woman, the very image of the great Earth Mother, holds her daughter piggyback style, the daughter caught happily in a little girl pose even as she is transforming herself with rings and fingernail polish into adulthood. The playful embrace underscores their biological bond but also mirrors the deep emotional tie that radiates its own life through the picture. The Cape Cod photographs often play off muted or coppery hues that Meyerowitz describes as the ”weather-worn colors” of the landscape. The portraits blend the people and their surroundings as one in color and spirit. The people and places seem familiar. The photographs are filled with cues about everyday life. They are a striking contrast to the popular black-and-white portraits of Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Avedon, Meyerowitz`s New York contemporaries.
Mapplethorpe and Avedon work with formal studio backdrops and stylized poses. Mapplethorpe`s highly choreographed portraits depict the human body almost as works of sculpture. Avedon`s photographs focus with a stark, detached eye on idiosyncrasies of feature, gestures or dress. His portraits can be viewed as penetrating and revealing or grotesque and voyeuristic.
Avedon tends to work with his subjects for half an hour, the way he might develop a sitting for his commercial fashion photography, Meyerowitz says. His people ”rise and fall in front of him. I`m working with one instant, one image.”
”Meyerowitz lets the subject choose the pose. He rejects nearly all the conventions of commercial photography by working outdoors (never in a studio), by accepting whatever illumination is available, and by often shooting into the light,” states Sally Eauclaire in her book ”New Color/New Work”
(Abbeville Press, $39.95). He rejects devices that might ”distance the viewer from the human qualities he perceives in his subjects,” she says.
Eauclaire, director of Chicago`s Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, included several of Meyerowitz`s portraits in a recent color photography exhibit based on the book.
Meyerowitz currently is working on a group of photographs that show
”intimacy among women” in the gay community of Provincetown. He says he wants the photographs to ”maintain the intimacy without turning it into something pornographic” and adds he`s not sure how successful the project will be.
He also is preparing a book about the history of street photography, working jointly with Colin Westerbeck Jr., a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute. They are organizing an exhibition of street photography that Travis hopes to open at the Art Institute.
Meyerowitz lives in New York City with his wife, Vivian, and their two children.
What: Joel Meyerowitz lecture
Where: The Art Institute of Chicago, Price Auditorium
When: At 6 p.m. Tuesday
How much: Free
