Photographer Profile: Joel Meyerowitz
Thursday, November 13th, 2008
|
|
Joel Meyerowitz is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. He was born in New York in 1938. He began photographing in 1962.
He is a “street photographer” works works exclusively in colour. His first book, Cape Light, is considered a classic work of colour photography and has sold more than 100,000 copies during its 25-year life.
Joel Meyerowitz spent nine months at Ground Zero. He’d gone to the site five days after 9/11, and was doing what came naturally – raising his camera to his eye – when a policewoman’s fist descended on his shoulder. “She said, ‘No pictures, buddy, this is a crime scene,’” Meyerowitz says. “And immediately, I had this feeling that if there were no pictures being made, there would be no history. I thought, they can’t do that, it’s not right.”
He went to the Museum of the City of New York and proposed a joint project: under the museum’s sponsorship he’d create a public, not-for-profit archive of the site. Armed with an official letter, he went back to Ground Zero and became the only photographer to have full access during rescue and clean-up operations. From this exclusive access he produce the weight photo book Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive
For the next few years, Meyerowitz took photographs on the streets of New York, falling in with another photographer who roamed the streets: Garry Winogrand. “I liked his company, and he liked mine,” Meyerowitz says. The two would stroll down Fifth Avenue, taking pictures of the colorful characters and lives bustling around them. “Walking the streets and being alive to possibilities – those were some of the most wonderful moments of my life,” says Meyerowitz.
