Legendary photographer Joel Meyerowitz has been capturing life itself since 1962. Whether on the streets of New York City, the sand dunes of Cape Cod, or in transit across Europe, Meyerowitz has documented what he calls “visions in passing.”
Today, we return to this special, virtual retrospective, spanning six decades of his life in photographs.
Follow the virtual gallery here: https://talkeasypod.com/joel-meyerowitz-replay/
Pushkin. This is talk Easy.
I'm standing Forgoso. Welcome to the show.
Today we are joined by legendary photographer Joel Myrowitz. For sixty plus years, Joel has been documenting life itself on the streets of New York City in a moving car, across Europe, the sand dunes of Cape cod. He has a way of not just capturing moments in time, but creating them. As a pioneer of color photography, Meyerwitz's work has appeared in over three hundred and fifty exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. He's a two time Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the author of more than forty books featuring his photography. His latest is called The Pleasure of Seeing, a visual biography that charts his evolution through six decades of work, which is basically what we tried to do in this conversation with Joel. I sat with him back in the spring of twenty twenty one, about a year into the pandemic, when the prospect of living the kind of life captured in these photos seemed almost unimaginable. But even back then, Joel was undaunted continuing to make work at age eighty five, he has the irrepressible spirit of a twenty five year old. He's still curious, excitable, and it shows in each photograph we discuss in this conversation. If you'd like to follow along and actually see the photos being described, we've put together a virtual exhibit on our website at talk easypod dot com. Once there, you'll see each image with the corresponding time code that should help guide you along through our conversation. Again, that's talk easypod dot com. We've also included that link for you to click in the description of this episode. When I was re listening to this episode, hearing Joel talk about the joys of doing this work, pouring over each and every photograph together, it made me not only want to get outside and take photos myself, it also made me appreciate just how singular and special the process of art making is. And it's that same process, although in a different medium, that writers and actors are currently fighting to protect. In this strike, it's a process that's being jeopardized by artificial intelligence and institutions that quite frankly, would much rather collaborate with the controllable technology than an uncontrollable human. And yet in hearing Joel talk today, I couldn't help but shake the fact that it's a human that made these photographs possible. It's that irrepressible spirit I talked about, that person you'll hear in this conversation that still at age eighty five, continues to wade into the world camera in tow and give us the ability, through his photographs to see what we may have otherwise never noticed, a window into the human condition the way only a human can create. And with that, here is our celebration of the life and work of photographer Joel Myerwitz. Enjoy Joel, A joy to be with you.
I'll be able to answer that when we finish, but I feel like it's going to be fun right from the get go.
I'm overjoyed to have you. Whether I convince you it's a good time, by the end, you'll have to let me know. You've spent a lifetime working in the streets. I feel like this is as good a place to start as any which is. This past year has been just about impossible to do the kind of work you've done for fifty eight years. Now, how have you managed the last year.
You know, it turned out to be a really interesting challenging year, and not only from the COVID side of the game. But in January last year, January first, I was in London and I thought, what have I never done photographically? That might be an interesting year long project. And as I searched through my various interests, I realized that I had never made self portraits. I mean, the course of my life, one here, one there, you know, with a big camera or something like that. But selfies as a phone trick never appealed to me. Although I once had a little skin cancer on my head, so I took a picture of the top of my head so I could look at it better.
But I'm not sure that counts no.
But I thought, why don't I try to see what a self portrait looks like at my age? I was eighty two last year. I wanted to see if there was any value in this and could I sustain my interest in it photographically, and could I in fact push against the limitation that self portraiture imposes for me. Photography has lots of interesting side streets to go down periodically, and what's kept me going for the last almost fifty eight years, is that I've changed every six or seven years. Something else seems to feed me or at least pose an interesting question. So I started making these self portraits, and then by March there was a lockdown and the portraits continued, mostly indoors or on the brief walks we were allowed in London at that time. Anyway, that challenge over an entire year, and I've made every day, three hundred and sixty five days. There are probably almost four thousand photographs right now, which means I worked it in interesting ways, and I have a body of pictures that are shocking to me because of the spirit and play and unexpected qualities of them. What's really an advantage is the likers that I use have a twelve second timer, which means if I was doing something in the house or wherever I was, and suddenly I had the impulse, oh, this might be interesting self portrait, I could turn the camera on, set the timer and then just live my life and the camera would take a picture, not me. It was in the hands of chance, and that is as close to the street photography as you get, because you depend upon chance where you are, what happens, all of that unexpected, So in a way. I was trying to give myself a kind of operating space that allowed for chance to catch me off guard, so that I'm not posing and trying to look good.
But do you look good in some of this?
I look like me sometimes good, sometimes like a schmuck, sometimes like you know, half awake. Because I shaved, I showered, I wandered around my robe, I smoked some dope. I swung a stick at stones, I played ping pong, I flipped eggs. Whatever. It gave me something to engage with every single day spontaneously. I didn't have to make a plan, and I think that that kind of engagement that comes up out of nowhere is very lively. It kept me going because, you know, sometimes the day would go on and nothing happened, and it would get to dinnertime or even after, and then something would happen that seemed so potential.
You know, mm hm you mentioned this term. I like the spontaneous engagement. I feel like that has to find your work from the start, and before we start to walk through those kind of six to seven year work cycles that you're talking about, I want to go back to the first time you felt an impulse to be a photographer. It's nineteen sixty two. You are in New York City working as an assistant to an art director at an ad agency. At the time, you folks had hired Robert Frank, the Great Robert Frank. You go and visit him on set. He moves around in this sort of balletic fashion. He immediately inspires you. And I know we are more than half a century removed from this afternoon, but could you take us back here and tell me what happened that day?
Yeah, I can't. Thanks. That was a very nice summation of the legend. You know. It was right around now. It was sort of mid April. I had designed this little booklet, like sixteen pages, and it was about two young girls who were between ten and twelve. Because the ad agency was trying to work on a campaign where they could make consumers out of ten and twelve year olds. Mommy, I need this lipstick. Whatever they were selling at that time, they were trying to generate the market. Anyway, I'd made the booklet and my boss said, go and watch him. I wasn't interested in photography. I was a painter, you know. I was paying the bills by working as an art director. And when I went to see him work, he paid me no mind whatsoever. He barely acknowledged me when I came in. He was kind of grumpy in those days and ever afterwards, you know, he didn't talk to me at all. He had he had the pamphlet open and he was just knocking out each picture, but standing behind him and looking over his shoulder and watching the action in front of him. Every time I heard the click of his leika, the actions seemed to have peaked, and I recognized it as it had come from nothing, nothing nothing, suddenly something, and then nothing nothing, And I thought, wow, he was always on time, and I began to look for that, and so in each scene, in each scene, that seemed to be his capacity. And he didn't direct in any kind of you know, directorial way. He kind of whispered to the girls, and he was he moved, and he used body language a lot. And I couldn't get over the fact that every time the action was at its highest moment, it's most telling and poetic. Sometimes they were poetic moments. I heard this tiny click of the likeam When I left the shoot and I went out on the street, the world was alive. To me in a way that I hadn't experienced before. It seemed like everywhere I turned, and every gesture that I saw on the street, from somebody slipping their laundry to the laundromat and somebody else carrying the shopping, or people holding their babies or their poodles or hailing a taxi, all of these things had some kind of thrusting gesture or embracing gesture something, and people look different. I began to notice their weariness or their joy or their interior expression, and I was just going click, click, you know, like an eyeblink. And instead of getting on a bus or the subway to go up to the office, I walked for an hour. And it was because I was taking a bath in the street, a human gestural bath. When I got to the office and my boss said, oh, hey, I was to shoot. I said, Harry, it was great. I mean, it was just wonderful to be there. But I'm quitting on Friday. And I remember he looked at me and he said, oh, was it a disaster. I said, no, no, it looked great, but I have to be out on the street. I can't be in an office anymore. And I haven't been in an office since nineteen sixty two.
This is striking to me because you go back to the office on Fifth Avenue. The office happened to be across the street from MoMA. You go up to see your boss, and I'm curious, at age twenty four, as you're riding in that elevator, had you already made up your mind that you were leaving?
Oh? Yeah. When I walked on Fifth, when I reached Fifth Avenue, that was about fifth and fourteenth Street, So I walked from fourteenth to fifty third, So it's like two miles in New York. That two miles on Fifth Avenue was a life changing moment. There was so much activity. You can see on Fifth Avenue, the high and the low of everything. There are people dressed in the most expensive clothes, and there are messengers trudging the law. There are beauty girls out of the fashion zone, and there are people who are basically begging for pennies. So the richness of that life on that forty blocks was so unbelievable to me that I never wanted to go I wanted to go inside again. It's like this is where I belong. I belong out in the.
Street, just on a dime. On a dime, you decided I needed to pivot.
I was twenty four years old. Life was showing itself to me in this way, and it was such a spontaneous thing. Earlier in my life as an athlete, I had to be spontaneous. I played third base, you know, in high school and college and sandlot wall I swam competitively. It was all about the firing gun goes off. You have to anticipate and go. So I had a physical life that was completely you know, sensory and instinctive. And so there I wasn't Fifth Avenue. You have to seeing Robert Franken, and my instinct was saying to me, this is where you belong. Another thing is my father was a salesman. So he was out drove his car around New York to dry cleaning store, selling all that stuff they need in dry cleaning store. And I used to go with him. And he wasn't in an He was out in the street and he would talk to people everywhere, and people played with him. And I always noticed that he was having fun in his life. He wasn't coming home and groaning about a day at the office. Maybe it was a natural impulse that I had found a way to be out on the street that was engaging and inspiring.
You wanted to have fun?
What else is there to do? You want to be serious all your life, heavy hearted, plotting along. I wanted to be out there in that dashing environment, moving with you know, the energy.
You went to the street and you never went back inside. Why don't we take a look at some of those early visions you're talking about and start to walk through these pieces I've put together for us. I'm ready now. Just a reminder, if you want to follow along, visit talk easypond dot com. Click the button that says listen here, and you'll be good to go. You can also look on your phone in the description of this episode, where we've included a link to the virtual exhibit. So, Joel, this is nineteen sixty two, nineteen sixty three. You're on a sidewalk in New York City. There's two men, one dog. What's the story here?
At that time I had met another photographer named Tony Ray Jones, now dead, famous English photographer, but at the time, he, like me, was an art director and we both met at a lab. On the very first day that I was processing my film. I was looking at it on the light box, and he was looking at his on the light box, and we looked over each other's stuff and we began to talk, and we found out we had the same jobs, and we were just totally smitten by photography, and we were beginning. So he and I started to meet regularly and walk on the streets. And one of the things we learned was that parades, which happened in New York throughout the spring into the summer. Almost every weekend there's some kind of parade, and parades offered us cover. We could go to the parade, and we could work the watchers of the parade. We could watch the end of the parade. We didn't have to take pictures of the parade, because that anybody could do. But we could teach ourselves how to be at the right distance, how to be invisible, how to learn to get close to people without being too shy, because I think we both were very shy kids, and we were trying to get over it. So this picture of a man with his hat over his heart and another man with a big dog has a wonderful ambiguity about it because it's a white man and a black man, and the white man looks like he is taking his hat off in some kind of gesture to the when in fact what happened was in the parade, the American flag passed by, and this guy, probably an old war vet, took his hat off and put it over his heart in a traditional American manner. To me, it provided an opportunity to make a kind of ambiguity become interesting. Basically, they're not related to each other. They only look like it because I put a frame around it. You can't see all the other people on the other side of each of them because I cut them out. So I was learning about how incidents that have no real meaning can be induced in some way by how you frame them. And that's part of the secret of photography is what you choose to tear out of the three hundred and sixty degrees in front of you is the content that strikes you as being important to you at that moment.
What's striking about this image and so many we're going to walk through, is that you have two strangers that are leading their lives much like most of us do, believing we're the kind of protagonists of our own story and your ability to suddenly thrust them into the same narrative. There's something very sort of poetic and human about that.
I agree with you completely, and I think that photography and poetry have a unique relationship. So one is visually, the other is verbal.
Written.
There is something about the effervescent moment that comes fizzing up out of normal, ordinary, everyday life and presents itself to the watchful eye as possibility. It's like a phrase. These aren't just a number of words. There's a phrase in there. There's a little relational combination or potential meaning or reading. It's by putting the frame around it that you omit everything else, and you only make the image of what it is that's speaking to me at that moment, and often it's as delicate and disappearing as just a thought that crosses your mind. But photography operates at a thousandth of a second. Early on, with color film, I couldn't get to a thousandth of a second. Two fiftieth was about the fastest you could work with color film of that day. But you know, two to fiftieth of a second is faster than the blink of an eye, which means your mind is working to understand the ineffable in a fraction of a fraction of a second, that penetrating power is so exciting everything in your mind lights up. It's what taught me to be faster and faster and making my decisions on the street. And that's why the camera is such a great tool for this kind of urban street poetry.
Even in this image, which again takes place in nineteen sixty two nineteen sixty three, How did you have such a good sense of what to capture and when to capture it?
Well, you know, I was an arter. I was a painter, so you're always dealing with a rectangle basically, and making marks on a rectangle. Pushing paint around offers one the opportunity to see the weight of something, or the transparency of something, or how colors work together and create some kind of emotional state. And then as an art director, I was doing the same thing. I was moving typography around in blocks up against a picture under over next too. So in a sense, the plastic nature of a frame is something that was already part of my vocabulary. So here I am on the street again during a parade, and I was pushed back because of the crowd of people. I was sort of pushed back. Maybe I was working my way through the crowd behind to get to the next place. And I was up against the window of a Chinese laundry, and up against the window, and I turn around and I see this face if a kid is pressed right against the window. He's looking out, and then there's a piece of typography or something Chinese lettering on the upper right, and then his brother or sibling in the background, and then reflected on that is the street across the way with these black vertical dashes underneath these red swoops with more red. I mean, look at it. It is so graphically satisfying. I made the picture, but to be honest, Tony and I, as are directors, we're both trying to break away from that kind of graphic shooting. It was almost as if it was too easy. I mean, sometimes it does provide a very powerful image like that one, a curious image. So by making the photograph, each time you click the button, you learn something. You take it in and then you wait to see how it came out. And you know, I recognize that it was who I was at that age, even though I would soon let go of graphic things. It was who I was.
You say that when you take a photograph you learn something. But I've also heard this quote of yours, which is that you don't know exactly what you're curious about until you've taken the photograph. Explain this philosophy to me. You don't know what you're curious about until it's already down on the page.
Well, your instinct, My instinct makes me move and make that photograph. I make a distinction between taking a picture and making a photograph. Making involves mental activity, volition, understanding, a sense of potential. Taking is you stand in a space and you press the button, and whatever is in the picture comes in. I think every time I make a photograph when I press the button, particularly back then when I was really engaged in trying to understand this new medium. The result of it, seen the next day on a slide projected on a wall, was what I learned from I learned, Oh, I needed to be closer in this picture. I needed to be slightly lighter exposure. My timing was a little too late or a little too soon. One sees through the failures what should have been done, so that excites a new possibility and when you get something that works very well, then there's a chance to really understand why is this working. Was it only the content or is it the way the content is laid up in the picture so that there's a hierarchy of elements that builds so that the picture works slowly. But if you look at it long enough, you'll get to it. And can you make it interesting enough so people will stay with it and look at it long enough? How do you do that? Because I was working in the era when magazines were the visual method newspapers, magazines, you turn the page in the magazine, you get some dramatic double spread. We didn't have internet. Television was still relatively recent, but the graphic world depended upon paging through thick magazines. So how do you hold on to people's attention? I think I also learned from advertising from being an art director that most stuff you publish is garbage. People turn the page. You just spent thousands of dollars in unknown hours building this photograph and there it is on the page and someone just turns to page to barely look at it, you know, So how do you attract the attention of the viewer. I must have gotten some insight from that.
You describe yourself as a shy child, and I wonder how much of the act of photographing people became a way of connecting with them in ways you may not have been able to outside of the frame.
It's almost as if the persona that I was born with that left me feeling like, you know, uncertain, shy about some things needed to develop. And photography helped me develop my persona. I became more confident, but I had to learn to do that. I had to learn to push myself into a situation where I would be shy. At some point, you know, someone saw some of my pictures and said, would you come and give a talk at the school, you know, Cooper Union, which was an art school. I had only just begun, you know, I've been shooting for like a year and a half or something. And I thought, oh my god, what do I have to say.
I don't know.
I don't know how to talk about these things. I'm just I'm learning how to make them. But I don't have anything to say. And I thought, Okay, that's as good a good a reason as any to say. Yes, how am I going to learn what to say? If I don't say yes. So right there was like yet another cellular opening in my being. And I remember I got up on that stage and I had written out everything I wanted to say. I got up there and I looked out at the audience. They were all sort of my age, more or less, and I thought, if I read this, I won't be able to look at them. I'll be reading it. So I just thought, oh, well, let's see, and I just I started. I put a picture up, I started to try to talk about it, and within a few minutes, I felt like, Okay, I'll work on this. I'll be I'll be able to survive this one sweating as I was every step of the way, having to be accountable to myself and to the medium, and to defend the medium, because you know, in nineteen sixty two and sixty three, photography wasn't the photography of today, a well respected, high paying art form. It was in the shithole. You know, they didn't care about photography was a craft. Even the museums didn't really care about photography, they thought, and all my painter friends were horrified, what you're going to give up the fluidity of paint on a surface for working with a machine. Everybody has the same machine. How are you going to differentiate yourself? And I thought, they don't get it. This machine is a magic box. I will enter the machine and travel with it. It'll take me all over my world and I'll learn from it. I had to kind of defend photography, and particularly I felt I was defending color, because even those buddies of mine who were painters and painted in color, they thought photography was black and white, like the world is black and white, right, I don't get.
It, But in fairness, you did decide to give black and white photography a try. This particular image of a woman alone on a bus maybe going to work is especially striking. Do you remember this photo?
Oh oh, isn't that heartbreaking? I'm so glad you found that one. No one ever shows that picture. There I am on the bus going wherever I'm going and hanging on to the strap or whatever, and I look down, bingo, here's this woman reading her mantra basically for the day, and all those shiny bars going forward. Is a kind of like a trill, a visual like that, like running your finger down piano keys and the bulky coats and such an intimate moment. I didn't have a color camera. Then you know it's for me. It's human tenderness. You know, if I had color in the camera, I would have made it a color picture. It doesn't matter. I don't know. Maybe her hair was red, maybe she had written those things in red pen I don't know. God, it's really brought me back to that moment.
Thank you you remember taking that.
Oh yeah, I say, I have a photographic memory, in the sense that every time I see a photograph, I remember what it was, where it was, how the moment penetrated and opened me up in some way. It's been like that from my entire life. I may forget other things. When I look at the picture, I'm back there in that moment. Thank you for giving me that one.
In these black and white images, but this is true of some of your color Sometimes I look at the photograph and it strikes me as so painfully human. This is a woman on the train reading her mantra. The mantra reads I'm eager to take action, embodying divine direction. I begin, I start. This is this woman's most vulnerable moment of the day, most likely, and behind her is a young twenty somethingter finding his footing in photography snapping this, and I have two big feelings about it. The first is thank God you did this, Thank God this is here you and I can look at this fifty years later. And then there's another feeling almost adjacent to it, which is, Oh, my god, I can't believe you did this to this woman.
I can understand that. Recently, a photographer I know, Jeff Mermelstein, has been making for photos of people on their smartphones texting each other. He sort of gets close to and looks over their shoulder and he reads all of their intimate nonsense that they're going back and forth, and you can see the whole scroll of the conversation. Now that is different than what I did. My moment was an intimate moment in which a woman was giving herself courage to go forward in the course of her life in that day, and I felt so moved by it. I didn't feel like I was stealing her soul or anything. I felt like, oh, I need to hear this too, because I need the courage to go into my own work with this kind of open heartedness and belief that I will benefit from being out in the world looking at things. So in a way. She was a spirit guide. Her instructions worked for her and for me, and I understood that it was a tenderhearted moment that should be saved because anyone seeing it might take courage from it. I really feel like my gesture was a generous one rather than a theft of her privacy.
I agree, but I wanted to be honest to the moment and to the feeling.
Yeah. Well, and a good one to bring up. And you know, because I had mixed feelings about Jeff Merblestein's work too, except it was so hilarious so many times that I just thought, oh, well, maybe he is doing his service and he is documenting a time in our lives. Oh this one. WHOA, I love this picture. Tell me about this picture, Me tell you why not.
That would sort of be like me showing up to a gym and Michael Jordan saying, tell me about how to take this jump shot, and.
You would say to him, well, he a watch, let me show you give me the ball.
I would say, I played in high school. Let me show you. I wouldn't. I wouldn't dare.
What do you mean you wouldn't dare? I mean with him, maybe, but with me. You could dare You're already a finely tuned reader of these pictures and obviously a given thought to it. I mean this, would we canna have a conversation about this? Tell me what you see, not the pars necessarily, What do you get from this picture?
I'm not entirely sure what it says about me. But when I first saw this photo, I thought, is she getting put in the back of a police car? Of course she is not. She is a four or five year old young white girl in New York City. It's clearly not a police car, but in the right angle it almost looks like one. And I'm struck by, of course, the frames within frames. That's sort of the easy pinpoint. I also have this sort of recurring sensation throughout your work, but especially here, of how on earth did you get this moment? How did you capture that kind of Robert Frank peak that you saw in the years leading up to this?
Instinct is the driving force. It's before thought or intellect. Walking down the street and seeing the open doors and the window frames, and then seeing this big man standing there with his hand out raised and the girl sort of crying. I just understood that there was misreading possible. Is this the case that mothers tell their children not to do. Don't ever get in a car with a stranger who offers you candy? That's in the picture right, an outstretched hand looks like it's got a little gum drop in it, who knows. And there's a girl who's crying, and an open car door or two or three with windows and all that stuff. And once again it's the ambiguity of the moment. I render all the detail you see, the hand, the coat, the girl, the windows, the street, but we don't know what they mean, accept as possible readings. And that ambiguity is part of what makes the puzzle sort of seize up and hold itself together for a moment, because you want to understand what am I looking at here? I'm saying this because that's how I look at photographs, not mine only, but other people's. I enter the picture because something unlocks the opening, so that I can enter the picture space and the picture time and look all over the frame to see what are these clues that are bouncing around all over the frame and yet holding some some fragile idea of reality. And it doesn't add up.
It doesn't.
It isn't resolve. We don't know if it's her grandfather, her father, a stranger, the chauffeur. We have no idea, but the picture maintains its authority. It's momentary poetry because of all of the factors, and I think particularly the frame after frame after frame is a device that has always been part of the history of art. You look at the great paintings, and very often he uses the frame within the frame as a way of telling a story about a story he's telling. Layers are being presented, and they're compelling, and one is willing to stay with them for a while and feel the delight of reading them. You don't have to come up with the answer, because it's the entry and the reading and the wandering around that is what is the pleasure.
I wonder how much pleasure you had going to Europe in nineteen sixty six. In nineteen sixty seven, you want to talk about an unresolved photograph. Let's look at this. This is such a curious image, I believe taken in Greece. Now you're twenty eight years old taking this photograph, and it really feels like a twenty eight year old taking this photograph. You're smiling big.
I'm smiling big because there's a lot of things going on here. In that year of traveling through Europe, well I had photographed from a moving car earlier in America on several trips around the country, But in Europe I was in the car every day, and so I would often see moments of poignancy or beauty or drama. At sixty miles an hour. This is slower than that, but I would see them out the car window, and there was no stopping the car to go get them because they passed already. So I had to photograph from the moving car, which meant accepting a new limitation. So here I was making thousands of pictures out of a moving car. My wife was driving. We're coming back from a beach or something. We're driving up a hill and this car is going down very slowly, and in the back is a young goddess sitting carefree on the top of an open air convertible back seat on a bumpy, turning, twisting road to the sea for all the world, as if she's on her sofa in her parents' apartment. And there she is. For a split second, she's a goddess. My response was, you know, her bathing suit, vulnerability, her carefree attitude, and we are passing each other. I have one split second to make the picture, so I was witnessed to this for a passing moment. It's perfect for the kind of shooting I was doing from a moving car, which requires instantaneous recognition and then picking the camera up from my lap and shooting while driving. Most of the time, the risk factor is incredibly heightened, and the pictures look careless and clumsy and full of other information like the window frame and the wiper, et cetera. But worth the risk. This one is the same this What is this guy doing on a road in Ireland with his dog on a roadside plinth? Is he teaching his dog to sit up for a biscuit? Or is he speaking to the dog telling him his worries. I have no idea, but as I pass I see man and dog frozen forever at one thousandth of a second. From a moving car. These glimpses of life are are so brief that they're beyond comprehension in the moment, they are just visions and visions in passing, And you know I came back from from that year, and I immediately went into the dark room. I shot as much color as I shot black and white in that year. And when I got into the dark room, I started printing like crazy, and I wound up printing over two thousand pictures from a moving car. And I remember being just bowled over by the chanciness and the awkwardness of these pictures, and yet they really spoke to me. They were like a finger in the eye. I gathered up a hundred of them in a box and I went down to the Museum of Modern Art to see John Sharkowski, the director. He was a mentor to a lot of us young photographers at that time, and I brought the pictures in. He was free. In those days. You could literally walk into the museum without having to go through security and go knock on a curator's door. Can you imagine? And you could bring art into the museum today if you're going in and have to look at everything in the back. Anyways, I went into his office, so I sit down and I said, I got a crazy bunch of picks. I don't exactly know what to make of these things. And I told him a little bit. I showed it to him, and he's looking at the pictures and he's flipping through the pictures beautifully slowly. He's reading the pictures, and about halfway through he looks up and he said, let's do a show. Can you imagine being twenty eight years old and the director of the Museum of Modern Arts photography department is looking through a raw selection of pictures and he says, this is worth a show. It's so stunned me, you know, because I didn't have any idea that it was of that kind of merit. But he saw in the pictures the risk, the willingness to make pictures on the move and to throw away all of the practices of the street, which is about framing and quickly running in a few steps. I think he loved the spirit of play that I was willing to risk making pictures that were awkward or ugly or dumb.
What you're describing is a young person constantly on the move and an engagement with the work that they're doing. And I can't help but wonder was the work everything? Did it consume every facet of your life?
Yeah? The woman I was married to then, mother of my children, who just died six or eight weeks ago. Yeah, our marriage, although it produced children, was fraught with you know, a kind of loveless marriage.
You know.
I'll be honest and say that although I felt that I was trying to be there and be open for some reason, she couldn't, from her upbringing be available to that. And I think it turned my desire even stronger into my work. Although I was became a good parent and took care of you know, it, took responsibility and earned a living and did all the things to maintain a family, and we raise our children until they'd flown the coup basically. But I think I was able to pour an extra ounce of real devotion and love into this medium. And the medium was astonishing to me. It didn't call me to keep picking myself up and entering it. In some way, it was everything. Yeah, And I learned everything I know about myself and about life. I really learned through photography.
You sound almost bittersweet about that reality.
Of course, who doesn't want love to find love, you know, especially if you find someone when you're young and you do things together. We had all kinds of adventures, and yet it couldn't produce that mysterious chemistry that really makes for love. So yeah, it is bittersweet. I can't say now would I rather have had love over photography. I don't know if that would have changed the chemistry or the equation at all. I might have been even more of a photographer with love in the sales behind me. I'm married to a woman now who we have finally found each other and we've been together thirty years, and really her love has been such incredible energy in my development. You know, I can't imagine life or photography without having Maggie in my life. Where'd you find that? It looks like a real prince?
Those are your hands?
I thought you were holding it, So yeah, that's my mother and father. However, that picture is a total lie on one hand and the truth on the other. My father chased my mother for the entire sixty years they were together, and they duked it out that whole time, but he loved her no matter what, and she was constantly, in a sense sense bringing him away. But they had something. There was some chemistry there that I got in that photograph. For sure.
I present that photo because we're talking about love and marriage, and I wondered, how much of yourself do you see in looking at them in that moment.
I see a lot. I you know, as a kid, I recognized the tonal qualities of their life, the struggle. I even once said to my father, Pop, you're really not happy. I mean, you leave. Why don't you go find someone who'll make you happy where you know we're all growing up? Okay, why don't you go? And he couldn't. And I see that some of the lessons that every child learns from being around their parents shapes their adult behavior. And I feel like I was probably carrying out some things that I thought I learned from my father, and you know, the kind of sacrifice and all the stuff that you hope you can attain or change somebody. You can't change anybody. Really, It's not up to the other person to change anybody. It's up to the person if they want to change, they figure it out. But because there were children and the marriage, and we were certainly friendly and companionable, and we enjoyed a lot of things together, just the big missing piece was the missing piece.
After the break. More from photographer Joe Myerletz. As you're in your late twenties, married with children, this country happens to find itself in the Vietnam War. Your decision at the time is to sort of present this idea to the Guggenheim people about going around America and photographing Americans in this time of combat. This is a particularly famous photograph, I think, because the colors are so striking. But now that I've set up the series, is that a fair representation of what we're going to look through right now?
It is? It is because the subtext was that America was in a period not only of an unjust war and protests and everything, but it was also coming off of a very a long post war up. There was there was a curve up in the middle class was developing. People were able to buy their homes, you know, wages hadn't been stifled like they have for the last twenty five thirty years. So there was an optimistic sense of well being. And what I began to see in the context of the war was that a leisure class and the concept of leisure time was being offered to the American public. And so this disjunction between the conscription of American youth and sending them away to a war that was totally unnecessary, and people not caring about it, living their lives of leisure time. This new class, this sort of struck me as the tinder and the flint that was creating a visual spark for me in American life, because you know, I think so many photographers in my generation wanted to accomplish something that Robert Frank did in The Americans, which is the journey into the heartland to see what this country looked like in this time. This Gugenheim was basically twenty years after Robert Frank set out to do The Americans. So it was okay to have another look because we were in a different world. So anyway, I think we all had this yearning to create a document of our time that was stimulated by Robert's work.
It's a very different depiction of America, I'd say, yeah.
But also he was a foreigner, he came from Switzerland. He had a way of looking at America one step back from what someone who was born in the Bronx and understands something about the culture. I went to school in the Midwest, so I had some sense of the American spirit or personality in a way I could read some signs elsewhere, even though I was in New Yorker. Things weren't that unfamiliar to me in Texas or in the heart of the South. So yeah, and my pictures are different because I'm also a different kind of wise guy than Robert was. I'm a New York street kid, where the humor of American movies, you know, Abbit Costello and the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers and all the dumb stuff that I saw in the movies, I saw in real life too, And I read the cartoons and comic books were a huge part of my life. So things happened in frames in comic books. It's part of recognizing things in frames. Probably was stimulated by that. So certain dumb things like these. The waitress just brought these incredible malteds, almost pink malteds out to Scotty's drive in. And this beautiful old car. It's a color picture, kind of crazy color picture. And if it isn't delicious, don't you just want one of those? Of course I'd like one. Right now.
Let's take a look at this photograph, which I believe is in nineteen sixty seven in the Bronx, A different kind of image from the Vietnam War era. Now you shot this one in black and white and in color, but it is unquestionably a color photo.
Yes, well, I was saying before that color was disparaged by all serious people. And in nineteen sixty three, when I was able to get a second camera, I started carrying color coda chrome in one and black and white and the other. I felt compelled to try to make the argument for color. I wasn't able to do it unless I had some kind of proof, so I started whenever there was a possibility of like this shot, the action isn't disappearing in her picture. The guy isn't there in the chair, and the people in the background aren't there. This is our wedding portrait picture, so she's going to be isolated near the tree. But in my picture, the guy is there looking on, the bride's in the middle, the people in the background, it's all happening. But there was enough time for me to make a black and white and a color one. That way I could compare the two, and over the years I've made hundreds of these comparisons. Particularly in the first six or seven years from sixty three to around seventy I was doing it quite often, and a curator in Paris a couple of years ago, said, I always wondered what happened to color photography? How did it go from not being taken seriously to suddenly in the late sees it became the thing, he said, And now I see you're the missing link. You were making color and black and white pictures, trying to discern where the power lay for you. And I thought that was so generous of him to think of me as a missing link. You know, I didn't think I was missing because I was there all the time making those pictures and trying to promote color, but nobody was paying attention. You have the black and white one there.
I do look at that practically the same image, just in black and white, and yet side by side the two feel entirely different.
Yes, her photographer is telling her to smile. The idea of description is a very potent idea. John Tcharkowski once wrote, or not more than once wrote, all you do is you point the camera at something and you press the button, and the lens describes everything in front of it. And he said that so many different ways, talking about the descriptive power that as a young photographer, that idea penetrated me and I thought, that's what I want. I want as much description as I can get in a picture. That's what makes the picture. I think everybody misreads things so that they get their own take, And so I felt that you look at those two pictures side by side, and the color one gives you the same bones as the black and white one, but it layers all those colors in there. So the complexion of the young bride, the lipstick on her lips, the way the flowers look, the man on the lounger, the shabby clothes he's wearing, and the colors of them, the whole green of the environment. All this stuff is description and black and white it seemed to me at that point was much more about the graphic power of things. My feeling was, is this content more persuasive? Am I getting more out of it? And my answer was yeah, I am.
As you accepted that truth about photography that you wanted to only shoot in color, There's another component at played through the work from the late sixties through I don't know the end of the eighties that I want to kind of sit with, which is that the people inside the frame. I don't want to say they appear more innocent than they do today in modern photography, but they seem so much more present and alive, and you just happen to be there to capture them.
Well, you know, you have to work in the era in which you are alive. And certainly if you were to look at pictures of early twentieth century New York and you see their pictures of the streets, and it is even more innocent, And the streets are busy. Horses are being you know, dragging carriages and trolleys, and women are wearing bustles, and there are lamp lit light posts, and the streets are busy, but it seems it seems even sweeter. I mean, this kind of signage didn't exist, this noise above the heads of the people didn't exist. So today we look at things and you know, the streets are populated with everybody holding an electronic device in their hands in front of them, watching a movie, listening to music, talking on the phone, taking a picture, you know, checking a schedule. Everybody is attached to a device, and so the imagery on the street doesn't have the innocence of this particular picture, nor is the overall feel as communicative as it is today. Because in those days people looked at each other. That was what you did on the street. You walked along, you blonde, everybody, Oh, look at that, look at him, look at that outfit. Nowadays, people are so self involved on the phone that the texture of the street, the emotional human texture of the street, has changed. It's harder to make pictures that are meaningful because they're derailed. Every time you see a photograph on the street, there are a half a dozen people holding phones, So you think, is the artist making pictures of people holding phones or is this action the reason for the picture. But look at that picture for a second, against the man standing next to the dog, for example, That was such an innocent picture. Back then, it was simple, and you could see how complex my way of looking at life became. I grew into the understanding that I could make a photograph that says dense and noisy and has no real subject in it. I was trying to get away from court moment because Cartier, Bresson and Frank and all those me included were using the court moment as the hook to make you look at the picture. And I wanted to see if I could dissolve that and make a picture about life in the streets that is a bundle of human energy and chance without telling a story of some sort.
Here's another one that can be described as a bundle of human energy, but it almost feels like a kind of seventies neo noir film the way the light and the shadows are playing together. Did it still give you joy looking at it?
Oh? Absolutely absolutely. It's one of those wonderful occurrences where you know, I saw this couple in their camel coats walking towards the street corner, and it was just that kind of cold day that all the heating systems below ground level in New York. When that rises, it deuce is steam on the streets, so people are always walking through these billowing explosions of steam. So I was moving quickly to catch up with them. And at the very same time, two other people and camel coats, not together, are in the frame and there are pictures printed on their backs, and I think, oh my god, I made one picture only before it fell apart. But the overall discipline that I was working with then, which was a deep space discipline where I didn't depend upon the incident, and yet in this one I had both the deep space and several incidents happening at the same time unrelated. So it's a blend of good fortune and great light and what it was I was trying to do. We really make photographs, we don't take them. I mean, if you're serious about the medium and you study it and yourself and your own pictures, after a while, you certainly learn your your deepest criteria for making interesting pictures. And certainly light is the component that makes everything visible. You know. We go to the theater, right and the theater is dark, and then the curtains open, the light goes on. You're in a stage set and suddenly everything there is important to you, and the lighting director will change the light during the time to add or subtract emotional qualities. Real life is doing that all the time. So for me, I have to put myself in places where I feel the descriptive quality of the light adding something else to human activity. It's just training. It's like you get on a baseball diamond to play ball within the precinct of that diamond, and everything is within the dimensions of that space, and you act within the dimensions of that space.
This is a photo quite literally of two children at a baseball diamond the Empire State Building in the background. And when I look at this image, I think of you as a young boy growing up in the Bronx, a Yankees fan. No doubt, what does this photo mean to you?
It shows you how this is indicative of everyone's own evolution. I had just bought a view camera the year before, and I had gone off to Cape cod to work with it because it's not a fast camera. I had also studied Hoku sais paintings and engravings of Mount Fuji in my art days. And I came back to New York and I wanted to work in the city, but not with the thirty five. I wanted to see if I could push the eight by ten to work. And I thought, well, if I give myself a pivot, if I used the Empire State Building as Mount Fuji, and then I walked everywhere in New York that I could see the Empire State Building and I would photograph ordinary life just like Hokusai did. If I could do that, then I might be able to work with the view camera, and I'd have all these Empire State Building pictures that would show real life going on nearby. I could work the two things, the near and the far, because the descriptive power of the eight x ten is so great that I can photograph something that's a mile away while also photographing something that's twenty feet away, and they would both be sharp, and I can blow them up six feet tall if I want, and you could enter the frame. I used the Empire State Building as my lever to lift myself up to a new way of working within the limitations of the large format camera.
Here you are finding that eight x ten camera, and this camera for context is really, even at this point in history, an outdated form of technology. But right now I'm presenting Joel a photo of his younger, shirtless self. You look quite good here, by the way.
Yeah, I do. And that's on Cape Cod and I was swimming miles every day in the open water, so I was in biking and I had hair.
This moment of working in Cape Cod and Province down there seems to be not just that kind of creative shift you're talking about. It was like a whole life change was happening.
Oh and it was. I mean, just changing cameras was a change both in philosophy and in behavior. It comes with the territory. When I was working more slowly, I was seeing differently. This is a perfect example. Let me tell you about this picture. This is a bunch of laundry on a line, blowing in the wind, towels stripes and orange and red and yellow and blue and gray striped towels and sheets. I'm walking along the roadside and I hear this flapping sound and I just stopped for a second to look at it. And because there was a frame in the middle holding up the laundry line, it was like screen. And I'm seeing this thing inside of a screen, and it was so tender and beautiful and so ordinary. I thought to myself. If someone asked me, what did you take a picture of today, and I said blowing laundry on the line, they would laugh at me. And yet I thought, you know what, it's so beautiful to me right now, I'm going to make a photograph of it. No matter what. To have moved to simple things from the complexity of the street, to move to something as mundane as this, it took a kind of courage and willingness to shift.
This also is part of that shift. Here in province down it's about as far away from New York City as you could possibly get. What are we looking at here? Exactly?
We're looking at a porch in the house I rented right on the sea, and there's a column, a classical column, holding up the porch, and the last bit of sunlight is coating the column in gold. It was so profound that a structure for me, a humble structure, nothing elegant really about it, but the light made it classical in some way. It could be my parthen On. Instead it's just a wooden column holding up a porch. A large format camera changes the way I respond to information in it. It has a grid on the back. There's a tendency to align things to the grid, to use space in a more classical way. Because it's such a big frame. Space and light became interesting because that camera is so definitive that you can photograph things one hundred feet away or one hundred yards away and they would have all the power. Because a thirty five EM frame is just the lower left hand corner of an eight x ten. An eight x ten piece of film is thirty six shots. Because when you take all your negatives out and you put them on a contact sheet, it's an eight by ten contact sheet and it holds an entire role. So in one sheet of film you get that much power.
This photograph of people in the water. Again, you're using space in a different way. I flipped through all these images in Cape con Province down and I want to ask you, it seems like the older you got, the less busy images became. And I wonder if that disinterest or sort of a lack of interest in the busyness of a frame corresponded with aging.
One could speculate about that because I think, I think if we all keep outgrowing your skin in some way, and you know, I bathed in the street for fifteen years or so intensively, and then I find myself with a large camera in a big open space which is a sandbar sixty miles out in the Atlantic, and there are no big buildings, there are no heavy shadows. Light is different sixty miles out in the ocean than it is on the mainland, and so things become different. Space becomes different scale, All of these things change, and you can only photograph where you are. You know, if you're handling the camera, where you are is what you photograph. And so I was in places in which figures were tiny, and I was very interested to see how well this big camera could deal with things that were far away. So I developed a different, more meditative side to my seeing, and I was willing to let go of some of the dramatic muscularity of the street. I'm a realist in that sense, is that I can only photograph where I am. Whatever is there is what speaks to me, and so being is actually the thing that is so thrilling. And then if you are where you are, if you're really connecting to where you are, then stuff comes up that you're totally unexpected. Like you go for an ice cream here at this you know, fried clam bar, and while you're waiting for your ice cream, a girl rides up on her horse to get her fried clams. And I'm there with my eight by ten camera, but I can see that, you know, she on the horse and the scale of that ice cream cone above her are two very funny, unexpected things together and they make a photograph. They create a moment of opportunity where there was nothing before. But if you don't carry a camera with it, then you'll never make those pictures. And I carry that eight by ten camera if I went to the supermarket, if I went to the beach where if I went, that camera came with me. It was schlepping an awful lot of stuff, but boy did it pay off.
But whether it was eight y ten camera or the handheld like a camera, you always seem to have a camera with you, almost like it's an appendage. And I asked you earlier because you described yourself as a shy child, about whether you felt the camera was your way of connecting with people, of communicating with them. But I wonder, at your age, do you think you see people best inside the frame? Do you understand them more only once they've been photographed?
Yeah, I think that's that's fair, Although it's that question has or the response has a little stretch in it, because when I don't have the I don't walk around with the camera to my eye. I walk around with a camera either on my wrists, in my hand, or on my shoulder. When I see something or anticipate something out there, I really focus on it hard and just visually to make sure that what I'm seeing is worthy of even more attention. And as the camera comes up and I'm moving into place, let's say I'm already processing all that data, we can put it in that kind of frame of reference. I'm beginning to see the potential reading of it or the misreading of it, but it starts to make sense. And then when the camera puts the frame around it. Even if ambiguity is part of it, there's something about that heated up moment that's intensified. As the camera glides up to my eye. It's as if I'm understanding it all at the punctum, and that's it. It comes from a visual anticipation and recognition of something cohering in front of me that's worth my attention. It doesn't always pay off, but it means that the attention is the thing that is being focused. So I get a sense of it, and then afterwards, if the picture has value, then I could read it. It's as if you write something down in the heat of the moment, and then afterwards you read it and you realize you were onto something but you didn't quite express it well enough, but you can refine it a little bit with a photograph. You may not refine that picture, but you may have made two, three, four in a row. And I follow that continuity along with it. I write it like I'm surfing away for something. It's so physical and visceral, and it has the components of knowledge and understanding and recognition. I coast with it as it unfolds. I'm there with it. It's very physical, you know. I think most people don't understand that. That's part of the balletics of photography in the moment, is that you ride it out, you stay with it.
You said once, I walk around the world waiting for something to penetrate my natural resistance and open me up. I don't want to make another good photograph. I want to have another experience of life being so thrillingly perceived that I'm helpless in front of it, and I just say yes, yes to this gosh.
I said that. Well, it's true. I feel that way because you know, I know this little trick in there. If I don't want to make enough good photograph, good is not good is sort of a mid level position, but epiphanies which happened on occasion. If one is open and it's the world that opens me up, I see something unexpected and incredibly beautiful, like spiritually beautiful, that knocks me wide awake. There was a great Soul Bellow book that I read when I was very young, Oh Henderson the Ranking. It was cool, and it's about a guy who's, you know, got a big, big appetite, big ego and everything, but he can't seem to learn a lesson unless he gets hit on the head with it, you know, and then suddenly he's, oh, oh, I see it, and life keeps on telling him these important things. He's a bullheaded guy who's he seems to just go forward doing things, but every once in a while he's totally awakened by the experience, and it becomes profound that in some ways, I've always thought that I just go along in the world, and every once in a while, I get this bunk on the head of an image that appears in front of me that becomes fully dimensional. It's more than just a picture of something, but it becomes a thrilling ride through an experience that I hadn't anticipated and now is appearing before me like a vision. And you know, you hear in history people have visions of saints or healings or these crazy things you read about from Renaissance history. Well, the modern equivalent of it could be said to be a sentient photographer. She or he out on the street, suddenly witnessing a most ordinary, mundane thing transform itself into a moment of significance. The only reaction is to pick up the camera and press the button. And you can't even explain it to the person who was next to you because it's so fleeting, and what was meaningful has already dissolved into the stream of other things that are coming after it. Working in that kind of anticipatory state of mind. Really, it's something that's incredibly modern, and the camera is the right instrument for holding on to these vanishing fractions of seconds of recognition. And I've always felt it was the gift in my life that I was able to turn to the camera, turn away from the brush and its long pole of streaky color over a surface, to something as immediate as the pow of vision.
You talk about getting a bonk on the head, and I think many of us go through life and sometimes it has a way of knocking you on the head, but you're not quite awake enough or attuned to the world around you to even register to knock on the head. I guess I want to know, at eighty three, how have you stayed so open?
Maybe it's just the sheer weight of age. As one comes to the terminus of life. It's a downhill slope, has been for a while, because I'm in the last innings, you know, and it feels better and better to not have preconditions and preconceptions. Let everything be a surprise. I mean, sometimes I step outside here and the light is coming through the front gate in long slats of light across the grass, and insects are kind of flying up from the grass into the light, or there's atmospheric moisture hanging there, suspended, and I find myself just standing there like a like a real idiot, just looking at it. And then I catch myself. I realized I just drifted into a little reverie for fifteen seconds, and it was pure pleasure. I was doing nothing but being in that moment of awareness. And so I think that it's possible to be ever more open as one ages than the idea of shutting down all systems that probably happens at the end. I have no idea, although my son and daughter just told me that when their mother died just a few weeks ago, six weeks ago, that in the last days of her life, she said she opened up in ways that she had waited her whole life to open up. She was dying of something. It was consuming her. But she had this revelation toward the end of being open and free, and as wonderful as that is, I thought to myself, why wait a lifetime to only have it at the end? I'd like to have it, and I actually feel like I have had the gift of it many times in the course of my life through photography as a kind of medium between me and the world that has called me towards seeing the world more and interacting with it in a way, pulling bits of it in for myself. I'm grateful for this medium that it's kept me out in the world and not in a studio in a box throwing paint at the wall. All the great painters in the world put in their time in order to get to where they were, and it's a deep meditation, no doubt. My meditation happens on Fifth Avenue and in the countryside, and in a moving car and face to face with a stranger. And I'm so grateful for the variety of these interactions.
Can I ask This is not a comfortable question to ask, but I'm curious how have you reconciled with those final innings that you're talking about.
In the mid eighties, I took an acid trip with my best friend, one of a number, probably only four or five trips in my life, and each one was memorable, and this one in particular. We were lying on the grass on Cape Cod in the front yard of the house I rented, and we were just in bathing suits, lying on very prickly, uncomfortable grass. We were covered in sand because we had been lying on a sandbar, and somehow the tide came in and rolled us into the beach. We got up, and we went around the house to the front garden and we lay there on the grass and I remember at some point I put my hands in the grass and I opened up the earth with my hands. I just pulled it apart, and in the earth was an incredible world of worms and bugs and beetles and ants. And I'm lying, you know, three inches from it, looking in and it was seething with life. And at that moment I felt, Oh, that's what it is. It's full of life. And at some point I'm going to be part of that of that again, and so it is infinite. Whatever fears I had about death dissolved in that pulling apart of the earth, and my friend rolled over when I called him over us. You know, Mario, you got to see this, and together we held the earth open and we looked in and then at some point we just looked up from it at each other and we knew we didn't have to say a word. We knew that that was a teaching and that the fear of death the unknown dissolved. That's how I've made my peace with it. I'm going to spend as much time on the planet, doing as much, having as much pleasure as possible, but I know that the other side of it is going to be like that, and it doesn't scare me or put me off at all. I don't know if that's satisfactory enough answer to calm any of your fears, but it certainly worked for me.
I don't know if it calmed any of my fears. Maybe a little bit. But I like your interpretation not just of what happens after we're gone, but how you've gone about the time you do have here to experience as much pleasure as possible, which for you means staying on the street and taking photos and this latest book, which is coming out right now, Wild Flowers. It's just a testament to that philosophy to keep going, to keep making no matter the age it is.
I think it's fair to say that everybody recognizes their themselves in the next age that they reach. Now there's a kind of accumulated experience. And I'm not the thirty year old charmer on the streets of New York, you know, flashing a smile and moving, you know, swiftly to get to something I saw happening. I'm my age, and what can I do with what I have now? Out does my body support me and take me to the moments that I want? And what kind of understanding do I have of events that I've seen happen many many times, but now I'm seeing them for the first time as an eighty three year old and they have a different significance.
Like this photograph here, what are we looking at?
You're looking at fifty seventh Street and Madison Avenue heading east. I see this woman mid crossing with this bandage across her nose. Just had a nose job, just had plastic surgery. I don't know what an accident And right ahead of me. He's this guy with two bundles of flowers and he's just walking, and the momentary pairing of the two of them was so potent. She's disfigured, but she's got a mask on. She's mysterious at the same time and at the same moment, it's an ordinary street crossing in New York, people coming and going. But my recognizing that there was a parody happening in front of me with a picture of Manhattan so the location is visible, that was enough for me to raise my camera.
And here what appears to be such an improbable image of these women coming up an escalator and maybe going down one. I'm not entirely even sure what we're looking at, but it seems staged almost.
I was in Paris at the famous horse race track called La Champ and every year in the summertime they have a big running of the field, and I guess women in particular, men dress up in morning suits and women dress in big hats and the like. And I was up on the deck there photographing and walking around enjoying it, and suddenly august of wind came and that hat that you see at the head of the stairs, blue off the woman in white, and the others turned around to get away from the wind or into the wind and hold their hats, and the laughter. So the whole thing happened in a fraction of a fraction of a second. But because I am who I am, I was able to just go click, you know, I had probably one or two frames I was able to get off. But look at it. It's kind of perfectly framed. Even the women at the right hand edge, her feet are in the frame. One foot is up off the ground as the wind swirls her dress around her thighs, and the other woman is, you know, lurching for her hat. The ballet of it all, and the onlookers who are obviously seeing the same thing from their perspective, and everywhere you look there are flowers on her dress around the perimeter. So it was a kind of abundance in a split second.
The idea of this book, Wildflowers, it seems to me that it's a little bit about how these happy accidents happen if you're open to them.
Yeah, it's a combination of things. As a photographer, I'm always looking at the world for the happy accident. So one day when I was editing my work, and I kept on seeing these pictures of flowers coming up. I thought, maybe I'm actually hitting on something that's more interesting than I thought, and I started pushing these flower pictures on my light box until I had a bunch of them there, and I thought, I bet I have a lot more. And by the end of two days of looking, I had a couple of hundred photographs on the light box, all colored pictures, and I thought, Wow, here is the fragile flower. Is a lever that's lifting up a ton of pictures, and it's allowing me to look at all of my interests. Landscape, portraiture, decisive moment pictures, pictures from a moving car, interiors. It's as if all of photography, every aspect of it, could be lassoed into this circuit.
Well before we go, I just want to show you a record of yourself in the streets of New York City circa nineteen eighty two. Why don't we take a look.
I'm going to invest twenty years of my life in trying to photograph this place, which is exploding every day.
It's changing every day.
That's what I'm giving my life to, and I'm hoping that in you know, twenty years by the turn of the century. There's a body of work that says, this is how it appeals to be alive in New York City. Here, this is one of the phenomenons of our time. It's everything that's good and everything that's bad is right here. It's power, and it's craziness and it's beauty, and then some people. You have to have it come through you and out of you. In a sense, you are the medium more so than the film is, because all those experiences have to pass through you first to land on that film and to make their way out to the world. In a clear, concise statement, this is what I saw. And if you can do that clearly, you can efface yourself. You can just step aside and let someone see the picture and experience the work as if they were standing in your shoes.
Yeah, isn't that interesting that I said we are the medium. The film is called the media in photography of the medium, But really we feel or sense something of value and it plays on us, and then we press the button, we open it up so that it catches it. That was a long time ago, and I kind of nice to see it right now, and that the sense I was trying to convey of what the experience was like was a spiritual sense, and it feels the same to me.
Now, how did you feel watching that video?
I could see the younger me trying to find a way of explaining verbally what it is that I was living and not being one hundred percent sure. I was searching for the right explanation of it and trying to stay intimately connected to my experience, hoping the words would come. So I saw someone who was still in a but in the throes of the beginning of comprehension. I was like, just over forty, you know, and that's an interesting age too. Things start to coalesce for artists, you know, you come out of the innocence of youth into some kind of knowledge, and then you try to expand that another level of seriousness. I saw the earnestness in me.
Then in that video you talk about documenting New York City and capturing it as it was. Then I wonder, are you proud of what you've done?
Yeah?
I am.
I feel like I've accumulated a number of moments that really represent who I was and how I felt about things. When I look back over the work, I can begin to see the arc of my life and the form, the visual form that has a accumulated this shape. And I think if anyone was to look at my work carefully, they might be able to identify something about me, or know something about me and my concerns and my way of looking at life. It's not cold. I feel like it's got some human warmth in it that has stayed there no matter what I've tried, because I've worked with a machine. This whole time machine is cold. So how are you going to make the heat that you feel radiate through the machine? And that's a big challenge, and I'm good with it. Right now. I feel like, Okay, yeah, I said what I'm capable of saying.
Well, I thank you for saying it for as long as you have and for walking through some of those images of your life with us here on the show. It means the world to me.
Thank you, Sam. It's really been a real pleasure sitting and speaking with you and feeling you your intelligence and enthusiasm and spaciousness. It's really been beautiful. I'm glad we had this time to.
Get Jil Myerwitz. Thank you very much. And that's our show. If you enjoy this episode, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you do your listening. I want to give a special thanks today to our guest Joel Meerwitz. If you haven't already checked out his virtual exhibit on our website, you can do so at talk easypod dot com. You can also find that link in the description of this episode wherever you do your listening. If you enjoyed this conversation and want to hear more like it, I check out our talks with Marina Abramovich, can Hinde Wiley, Tyler, Mitchell oscar Isaac, Margaret Atwood, Antoine Sargent, Toyen og Odotola, and Gloria Steinel. To hear those and more Pushkin Podcasts listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at Talk Easypod. If you want to purchase one of our mugs they Come and Cream or Navy, or our vinyl record with writer fran Leeboitz, you can do so at Talk easypod dot com slash shop. That's Talk easypod dot com slash shop. I also want to give a special thanks to our team. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Jenick sa Bravo. Our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden. Our research and production assistant is Paulina Suarez. Today's talk was edited by Claris Gavara and mixed by Andre Linn and Andrew Vastola. Our assistant editor is c J. Mitchell. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Christa Chenoy. Video and graphics by Ian Chang, Derek Gaberzak, Ian Jones and Ethan Seneca. I'd also like to thank our team at Pushkin Industries, Justin Richmond, Julia Barton, John schnar Is, Kerrie Brody, David Glover, Heather Fane, Eric Sandler, Jordan McMillan, Isabella Navarrez, Kira Posy, Tera Machado, Maya Kang, Jason Gambrel, Justin lang Leitao Mollard, Malcolm Gladwell, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next Sunday with a new episode. Until that, stay safe and so long.