The great American photographer Joel Meyerowitz talks to David Clark about his creative journey from black &white street photography to large-format colour work
Joel Meyerowitz is strongly associated with locations including Cape Cod in Massachusetts, rural Tuscany and the busy streets of New York, where he has created some of the most memorable work of his 60-year career. So it seems strange to be interviewing him on a freezing cold January day in a residential area of north London, where he now lives and works. ‘Well, here I am,’ says Joel at the door of his studio, as if also slightly surprised to find himself there.
Although a few months from his 86th birthday, Joel is remarkably youthful for his age; he’s in very good shape both physically and mentally, and speaks as eloquently as ever. His compact, bright, white-walled studio, which he shares with his partner and fellow artist Maggie Barrett, is filled with neatly arranged books and prints, as well as assorted objects that have featured in his still-life work.
Joel lived in New York for the majority of his adult life, then Siena, Italy for a decade before moving to London last year. Siena proved a fruitful ground for his photography and led to books of landscape and still-life subjects. He moved to London partly because Maggie was involved in a serious accident over a year ago and the city offers highquality medical care, but also so he can be close to the social and cultural life.
‘I really enjoy myself here,’ he says. ‘I’ve been productive since we arrived and have printed most of the work for two exhibitions. And there’s a sense of community and a quality of life in London that feels good to me, compared to New York which feels more pressurised now.
‘I like photographing here, although I don’t have a project that’s ongoing right now because other things are, in a way, of deeper interest to me personally. But I like being out on the street here. Streetlife is good when you’re in the centre of a city.’
Shooting in black &white – and colour
Joel started out his lifetime’s creative journey in photography in 1962. He was famously inspired to start using a camera by watching Robert Frank at work on an advertising shoot. He quickly established himself as one of the leading street photographers of his generation and he often worked directly alongside friends and contemporaries including Tony Ray-Jones and Garry Winogrand.
At the time, black & white was considered the only type of photography for serious artistic photographers, while colour was used for commercial work, glossy magazines or amateur snapshots. There was a great antipathy in the art world towards using colour; as the great American photojournalist Walker Evans said, ‘Colour tends to corru
