The Brooklyn Rail

Joel Meyerowitz never stops. With shows this fall in Berlin, London, Paris and, locally, in Montclair, New Jersey, Meyerowitz also presents photographs from his archive daily through an online platform, Fellowship. His energy is inspiring. His excitement for the medium, contagious. He championed color photography when it was considered plebeian, explored computers and new printing processes as they emerged, produced large-format photographs before they were popular, documented the valiant efforts at Ground Zero as the sole photographer granted unimpeded access, recently embraced blockchain to discover novel narratives around his archival footage, published the landmark Bystander: A History of Street Photography (1984) with Colin Westerbrook, and continues to ask what the medium can do next. As he says, “one has to be able to grasp the potential of the moment, to read the moment as it’s unfolding, and recognize some capacity of telling within this moment; the moment isn't just the thing in front of you, in the middle of the frame, it's everything in the space.” His conversation offers snapshots of cultural shifts, friendships with photographers and curators, and his personal and professional influences, to show a tremendous and generous vision.

Charlotte Kent (Rail): Photography often gets discussed in terms of its stillness, of capturing or freezing a moment. But, in Where I Find Myself (2018) you wrote about watching Robert Frank and discovering photography’s motion: “that was at the heart of what I had seen: movements, the physicality of it, the timing, the positioning. I played third base, I knew about that kind of movement, it was energy in the service of the moment.” Can you describe how photography was about movement and this physicality? And then maybe also, how baseball comes into that?

Joel Meyerowitz: On that first day that I saw Robert Frank working, I stood behind him. Every time the two young girls made a gesture, or had a reaction, as soon as it reached some kind of peak, I heard the click. And I thought, wow, he’s anticipating these sublime moments in the ordinary flow of everyday life, right at that peak of telling that summarizes it all in a gesture. To watch that for a couple of hours was like nothing I had ever seen.

Throughout our lives we’re constantly dealing with the range of perception about the spaces, the environments, the emotional context of everything around us. I think our understanding of our relationships to things and our experiences are about finding ourselves, locating ourselves in space. I played baseball as a kid almost every day in the spring and summer, and I played it in college for a while. You’re one of nine people on a fixed graphic. Everything that happens occurs with a kind of geometry in the space. I played third base. So if a ball was hit to me, I had to move fast to anticipate it, catch the ball, and throw it to the first baseman, before the runner could get there. To grasp the physicality of this total space, and the understanding of where everybody else is in the game… that’s part of the mystery and poetry of the game. I had to play my space in such a way as to be part of the whole and be aware of everybody else’s movements and anticipations. So I learned to read space.

At the same time, I grew up in the Bronx. My father was a salesman driving around New York, selling products to dry cleaning stores, but he had also been in vaudeville, and a stand-in for Charlie Chaplin. He had incredible physicality and movement. He grew up in the Jewish ghettos of New York and learned to survive. He taught me about watching the dynamic of the street: he’d say, “You see those three guys over there? They could be trouble, just stay away from them.” He was always saying, “Watch this, look at that.” Often, comedic things happened. He could recognize the potential humor in seeing two people carrying a sheet of metal or glass or whatever, and this other guy throwing the banana peel on the sidewalk. He’d nudge me, look at that, watch that, and I began to see the street as theater.

When I went off to university, I went to the art school and I started reading art history. There, I began to see a whole other concept of what an image was. At some point in my life, I must have been able to weave together the humanism of accident and incident on the street with a more classical understanding of flat space.

Rail: You had been painting prior to seeing Robert Frank photograph those girls.

Meyerowitz: Right. I knew nothing about photography. I had no sense of the history of photography. But when I left that photo shoot with Robert, and I went out on the street, everything there seemed dynamic. The way someone hailed a taxi, the way an old woman was carrying the bags, bent over from the stress of schlepping. The way the dog pulls her owner. Everything seemed to have a moment of humor or beauty or poignancy or tragedy or joy, as if all the emotional capacities of the world were suddenly visible to me in a way that I didn’t understand before. Instead of getting on the subway to be at the office in fifteen minutes, I walked it, which took me over an hour from 14th Street to 53rd and 5th Avenue, because I walked slowly, watching everything. By the time I got back to the office, I knew my life had changed. I was going to be a photographer, whatever that meant. I told my boss. He loaned me his camera. A few days later, Robert’s work came in, I put it together in the booklet, and on Friday, I left. I went out in the world, and I’ve never been back in an office since.

Rail: Did you have a plan?

Meyerowitz: I had no idea how to make a living or any of that stuff. I was in graduate school at Hunter College in art history. I was studying with Ad Reinhardt. There were a lot of other young artists, who later became famous, in the class with me. Anyway, I left graduate school. I remember the head of the department said to me, “What are you doing? Why do you want to be a photographer?” Eight years later, I won a Guggenheim grant. I saw him at the party and he asked me why I was there. When I told him I won a Guggenheim he asked me for what. I got to tell him: “For photography. Remember? You said it was worthless.”

Rail: That must have been satisfying. That summer when you left your job and school, you hitchhiked to Mexico with ten rolls of film. Because of the digital, we can do things over and over and over again. There you were, however, exploring photography, committed to it but still learning, and constrained by ten rolls. Did it feel limiting?

Meyerowitz: It was a financial decision. Ten rolls of Kodachrome by today’s standard wasn’t expensive, but then you had to process it. It would take me two days to shoot a roll of film. Ten rolls was 360 pictures and it got me to Mexico, but it didn’t get me back. [Laughs] It made me aware that every picture had to count in some way. That’s just a wonderful limit—it’s real, and it’s financial. I didn’t know who I was yet. I was still on the outgoing tide of what interested me, what was worth the photograph. Every shot had to have intentionality. Now you breathe and, woosh, you get a hundred pictures. I had to buy some film in Mexico. I bought a couple rolls of color but then realized we wouldn’t have enough money to get back to New York. I was traveling with my wife at the time and we did have to stay in places along the roadside. I couldn’t afford the color and the trip so that was the first time I shot black and white… but I knew at least I’d have images. So it was okay.

It was a good discipline to know my limits, to be really thoughtful, even in an instantaneous way, about the worthiness of that. There were many times on the streets, I would start and suddenly realize, I’ve made that already, I’ve seen that behavior. It was part of the training to encounter your own impulses and whiz through the library of your mind and realize, that’s not going to be worth it. Today, you don’t have to have that, so I think people today are probably more casual about their discipline. That may make it better, or it may make it sloppier.

Rail: You have many younger photographers who’ve become friends.

Meyerowitz: I’m grateful for that. It’s important to have a dialogue with them. When they show me their work, it’s interesting to see, to read their thinking through their pictures, and then to hear what they have to say about their work and what’s motivating them. It’s different. They have a lesser degree of humanism, in general, than the people working back when I was working. The politics of the thirties, forties, fifties, the wars, the financial collapse, post-war, the evolution of society… and most of us had come from poverty. Society, and its reactions, were important content. Today, I think that’s less so.

Rail: Dialogue is such an important part of a practice, conversations with peers about what you’re doing and how you’re thinking about it. Such friends say things that make you think about why you’re thinking the way you are, which then changes how you go out and see things, which then informs how you’re thinking about them. The dialogue with others also helps the dialogue with the self, perhaps especially with photography that aims to capture these humanist moments.

Meyerowitz: I thought the immediacy of photography required a kind of perceptual grasp of things that were in transit, that only the camera, set at a thousandth of a second could slice into that time span. If you were really precise, you could find the best of that. It challenged me beyond the simple fact of recording a moment. It was about using some ineffable capacities and learning how to develop them. Photography has been my education. Being in the world with the camera was key to opening up the meanings of the world. Learning to make photographs speak with some kind of consistent point of view or understanding of human nature, or the quality of atmosphere, or the seasonal slant of the light—all of these are elemental properties that make up a photographic image. A photograph looks like what’s there, but it’s also a reflection of what’s going on inside my internal universe.

Rail: So many people have been acculturated to that kind of visual dialogue and knowledge, but you’re talking the late 1960s, prior to immediate photography; the Polaroid SX-70 wasn’t even released yet. Is there a difference now?

Meyerowitz: The machine still makes the pictures, but the operators are now in a different culture. The world has gone around the sun sixty times since I started. During those revolutions, a different kind of engagement, different kinds of transmission of information, a different culture has appeared. I think people have this tool now as an everyday asset. Anybody can take a picture, but not everyone can make a photograph. What I’m making, I think, and what photographers—serious players in the medium—make, is a conscious decision about things within the frame so that there’s pressure: emotional, mental, spiritual, psychological, sexual. There’s pressure being put on the frame to illuminate some aspect of themselves in their time in their society. I think that young people today are certainly more aware of everything going on in their time than they were in the innocence of the sixties. So I think there is a difference. It’s opened up the language of photography.

Rail: Back when you became friends with Tony Ray-Jones, there wasn’t a huge vocabulary for photography. You were both trying to find words and ways of discussing what you were doing. Now there’s so much language around it. We’ve created this whole history of photography and applied all this language to photographers retroactively. Do you feel like there’s still things we don’t know how to discuss about photography, or describe? I’m asking you to give me words, which is funny, but are there things you think people still miss about photography or discussion of photography?

Meyerowitz: Yeah, there are values that I never hear anyone talking about when discussing who’s made the work. There are a good number of critics who are doing anthologies and writing forewords for books and everything. I read a good amount of that stuff. Quite often, I feel… this person doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. I mean really, they’ve gone off on some tangent. Those pictures don’t reveal that. Do you ever hear anybody talking about spatial perception and timing and reading the entirety of the frame? As a quality or skill, or as a characteristic of what the medium is? No, that disappeared.

It was John Szarkowski, who was really the great educator for my generation and the following generation, from the sixties through the nineties. John elevated the discourse; he was a true socratic companion. He would ask questions, and we, with the paucity of words and understanding we had at that time, were tasked by John to try to explain ourselves in a way that shed some light on our love of the medium, the efforts we were making to bring disparate works together into some kind of unity that had a kind of Robert Frank totality to it. I mean, Robert was the guiding light for an entire generation. He was also a colossus in the road blocking our advance. So anyone who survived Robert Frank, and there were many who gave up, who said, “Well, what can I do with Robert Frank?” And I would say, no, no, he’s just this thing in the road, you have to find your way around him. I believe that John provoked us to read deeply into the way photographs worked and looked, and how they made us feel, and find an expressive way for it. And through his writings, and his talks, he educated us. Have you ever seen any talks of John’s?

Rail: I have not.

Meyerowitz: Look them up.

Rail: I will!

Meyerowitz: And see some earlier ones rather than later ones. Because he had been a large format photographer, so he understood the interiority of the medium, the maker’s thrill. He was one of the only polymaths, geniuses, I ever met in my life. He knew things about music and art, literature and poetry, and growing apples. When he wrote, he brought in waves of energies that enlarged the language of the medium, but in very precise ways. John was able to illuminate the kind of hidden fretwork of a photograph in ways that allowed us to explore it, risk making some assumptions about it, to play with the potential in it, until we understood more about it. That’s the lever that lifts up the mind of a generation, and invites all to try and have something to say. It’s not about defending your work. It’s about seeing how it fits in with the time you live in, with the general zeitgeist, the information of the era. It was a beautiful challenge.

Rail: How often did you visit John at MoMA?

Meyerowitz: I would go see John three or four times a year. Inevitably he would ask, “Why do you guys always come with fifty pictures?” Fifty pictures seemed substantial. So we’d lay out those pictures and talk about them. He would give us the time; you didn’t have to make an appointment. Every Wednesday of the year, any photographer could bring in a portfolio and leave it in the MoMA photography department. John would sit with every one of them and read the whole thing, make some notes, sometimes buy a picture. Those days a photograph was five or ten dollars, maybe. But he made notes on everybody of any interest. John was a fly fisherman, and that’s how he explained the Wednesday portfolio day: “It’s like trout fishing. I never keep the fish I catch. I take them out. I see how beautiful they are and how big they are. Take the hook out, put them back on the water. I’m looking at everyone that’s swimming in the photography stream, seeing who might be interesting next time I see them. Who might I use in a show? Who might I think is worthy of collecting?” Like taking a bet on some young photographer.

That environment was illuminating. Having conversations of substance. Every time I felt like I had been really tested and I had learned something. Sometimes I actually said something fresh about a work of mine because I was in his company. I could risk going that far in speculating on the picture. I get that out of all the young photographers that I see because I press them. But when I read a lot of stuff that’s written, I don’t know where they’re heading. The things they talk about seem to me to be specious or empty of some guiding force or understanding.

Rail: Do you think that is because we look at images digitally now, in the small frame of a mobile device?

Meyerowitz: You may be right. I’ve got around a quarter of a million digital files on my computer, but I’ve keyworded them all. I’ve used them. I’ve put them in certain kinds of groups. I print them. I’m in a dynamic relationship with them. But not everybody does that. I believe in holding the print in my hand—it’s a hard fact. It relates to other things, and you can engage in the dialogue with the print. It does something to the wealth of imagery that you have stored in the phone. That digital realm is like an invisible library. Right? What will happen to it in a hundred years? Because it’s a huge record of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Rail: That quarter of a million photographs in your archive has turned into a project, “Sequels,” where you release one a day as an NFT through Fellowship for the next ten years. What inspired that?

Meyerowitz: Because I’m eighty-five, I felt it was important to look at the work that didn’t make the cut in the early days. Generally, I printed about a third of every roll. So that meant there were twenty-four pictures unprinted on these rolls. The rolls, contact sheets, everything was saved. About a year ago, I decided to scan every single roll of black and white and color of the stuff I had edited out. You can see what’s of importance to you in that first moment, and maybe get an inkling of where what you see is taking you. But in the moment, you can’t read the future. Over the years, I’ve gone back into things for research and wondered, how come I didn’t choose that? Now, fifty years later, I can see how interesting something was that I didn’t see then.

Rail: But how did you go through all those images?

Meyerowitz: I hired a smart young photographer named Brian Karlsson—someone we can count on to be a real contributor to the medium. He works in my studio now. We got a high res scanner that’s really beautifully crafted, and just shoots frame after frame. You can put a strip of six, black and white negs in there, and it will move them through. So you’ll see the roll and frame number. Brian did seventy-five thousand black and white images. Now ten years—for this NFT “Sequels” project—is only 3,650. So that’s a very small percentage of seventy-five thousand.

When Brian was first doing the scans, I was in New York, and I started projecting them and looking at them one after the other. The first thing I saw was my movement on the street. Looking at them with the loupe, you’re looking at individual frames. Now, up on the screen, I see the run—then I go in and see the individual frame, and I began to see… oh, these two people came together, there was a conversation, I stayed with them, walked with them, near or behind them, I stayed until it reached a moment, or it petered out. Meanwhile, behind them, I could see, far up the street, someone coming towards me. Thinking that was interesting, I would leave them. I’d catch up with that person and go on a new adventure. So now, in these scans, I saw my physical sequencing in the moment in the real world, my interest, my response, how I built it, stayed with it. So I showed Brian what I was doing. This project is not only about good photographs, but about behavior and enthusiasm and risk. It’s about the intangibles that are behind the making.

Rail: Does Brian see different things than you do?

Meyerowitz: While Brian was editing, he was looking at work I made when I was twenty-four or twenty-five, or twenty-six. And he was twenty-four. Sometimes, he would see a picture that interested him now, and he would throw it in a folder. Suddenly he had a couple hundred pictures. So, here we had a twenty-four year old talking to an eighty-four year old, who was at that time a twenty-four year old. We were having a kind of visual dialogue at a fifty year remove.

I showed Alejandro Cartagena the sequences when he was visiting New York one time, and also what Brian had in his folder. We put it on the screen and it made sense immediately. And so we decided, let’s call it “Sequels.” Let’s do one image a day for a year. Alejandro said to do it for ten years. That transforms it. Makes it a fresh way of thinking about the photographic language. What relates in a picture? Is it the space? The content? Is it about dogs? Is it about hairdos? Airplanes? What makes a sequence?

Talking to Alejandro and Darius Himes at Fellowship, and others involved with NFTs, I realized there was a new kind of collector, willing to use Ethereum or whatever currency to speculate on these digital images. They own a token, which is the same thing as if you bought stocks, you’d get a stock certificate, put it on the wall in a frame. My father would invest in his little way in stocks, and he was so proud of that certificate. In my life, I knew a few people who collected antiques, not something I collect, but they were nuts about their things in a great way. I’m not a collector because I’ve got thousands of photographs. [Laughs] I’m stuck with them. Working with Fellowship was an opportunity to use photography on a new platform. Maybe we could do something in a constructive way that would have “game spirit,” as well as individuality and collectability. I’m not going to get around it, it’s also about money, but that was true with every format… even wanting to make big prints of photographs.

Rail: Of course. Artists don’t live on air. What I love about your particular project is how it makes archives—often thought of as these fuddy duddy, dull things over in some dusty corner—into something with social and broad cultural value, intrigue and interest.

Meyerowitz: It’s dynamic. It’s changing. It’s being added to. Shown off in collections. Traded. So it has a game, a kind of collectability, and its own momentum. We used some of the work from Brian’s sequencing as a starting set. And I’ve spent this last week actually adding another couple hundred to the others within my sequencing. I’ll do this consistently until I have 3,650 pictures. I’ll see how long I can sustain it.

So far, every single picture has sold every day. They sell for twenty dollars, or for three hundred dollars or five hundred dollars or even over one thousand dollars. The bidding process means my job now is to see if I can make the sequences better. A lot of the pictures from the original selection were interesting when you looked at them, one after the other, and you saw the entire sequence like a flipbook. But if you only look at them as a single picture, they’re not so interesting. What has a stand-alone value, plus fits in with the one before or after it in a new way? We want to make it a game of seeing so that everybody gets a sense of what’s there and what’s coming; I want there to be a little anticipation, where people see these three are coming next but can’t buy them yet, but maybe want to. If I want to educate people, I’ll write a book. But if we’re doing this as a game, on the internet, it has to be interesting and fun, creating value, and along the way educating new eyes to the way photography works.

Rail: You seem to have an instinct for it.

Meyerowitz: I’m an early advocate of computers. In 1976 I made a living as a commercial photographer, just six or eight weeks a year. And I had a job for Scientific American. They were almost going out of business because of the oil crisis, and they needed to make an advertising campaign showing that their readers are not guys in white lab coats, but heads of corporations, inventors. So I was sent out to photograph incredible people, the inventor of the laser, guys working on the first computers, and I met a guy who was exactly my age, out in Colorado who worked for HP. He was the head of their computer division. We got to talking about being kids, me in the Bronx, him in Oklahoma City. We listened to the same radio programs at five o’clock in the afternoon. He said we were a network, even apart, still strangers to each other, we knew the same thing. While there, he told me that, perhaps one day, we’re all going to be communicating on devices as small as our radios were back in the fifties.

I flew back to New York and in the next issue of Scientific American magazine, I saw an ad for a company called Apple. They’re making computers that sit on your desk. I went all over New York trying to find it. I finally reached somebody who told me that there was a place that could order it for me. I got one handmade by Steve Wozniak with no serial number. My eight year old son and I didn’t know what to do with it, but we taught ourselves how to use it, even to write code. I knew at that moment that this little box was going to get bigger, better. It only had about 8kb of memory in it. That’s like an email. I went into it as deep as I could right at the beginning.

Rail: You have a retrospective at Werkstattgalerie Hermann Noack in Berlin, Meyerowitz, that opened in September. How is a retrospective its own kind of sequencing? What’s different?

Meyerowitz: A retrospective is about one’s own understanding of their evolution as an artist. There were the baby steps. There was a directional arrow. I followed that heading and this was the result. If this step becomes a dead end you work your way out of the corner. Often you have to jump, you take a risk, or you find an inherent challenge within the medium. I remember thinking… hmmmm, I never did portraits before. What is a portrait? How do you make it? Are you going to make it like Dick Avedon and shoot a ton of sheets on one person? Are you going to do it like August Sander, or Diane Arbus? What’s your voice? What are you interested in? A lot of questions come up that are really essential questions. A retrospective is a way of trying to find one’s essential questions of the medium and then work them to see how to solve that problem. I’ve been fortunate not to be bored by photography.

The show this fall at Tate Modern, Joel Meyerowitz: 1962–1980, has as its core color and black-and-white pairs. In 1963, I knew nobody else shooting color and black and white, of the same thing, at the same time, as close as possible, to see: why color? Everybody was rejecting it. It’s amateur. It’s for magazines, and advertising, they said. I thought, the world is in color! There’s so much energy coming from, say, the way that yellow bush in the shadows across the street has its front edges waving in the sunlight, and this tinkle of yellow over here, and someone’s walking by in a complementary color—or maybe the same color. Chance works in lots of ways. I was posing an argument trying to convince the photography world that color was of importance. Nobody was interested.

Rail: One of the things about those pairings also shows how the design of the photograph changes. Yes, it’s similar, but not perfectly the same. Why does it work for the black and white to be close-up and with the color, to be further back, with more of the environment? Why is the angle difference better here or there? Composition changes to make color or black and white respectively successful.

Meyerowitz: John made the statement to the effect that a photograph is about describing what’s in front of you. I misread it to say if a photograph is about description, then black and white is not giving you the full description. The color carries atmospheric, seasonal, temporal sensations. It offers you emotional content. If you want to describe things; everything in front of you, you really need color. That’s my argument.

With the pairings, I would have two cameras, but I didn’t always differentiate because I knew both camera’s exposures were set. All I had to do was focus. There were times when I didn’t know which was color or black and white, because I carried one on my shoulder and one in my hand, but it didn’t matter to me. It was the photograph that mattered. And then afterwards, seeing the proof would prove what worked. Sometimes, the graphical power of the black-and-white one really wins out no matter what the color one is offering. So I don’t think that color wins every single time. But overall it’s the color for me.

Rail: You were doing 35 millimeter and then by the late seventies you adopted 8 by 10 plate photography. Why return to an earlier technology at this moment in the seventies when new handheld image devices (the Polaroid or camcorders) are appearing?

Meyerowitz: I did that as a follow-through on the concept of description. In 1971, I stopped shooting black and white completely. I changed my working methods on the street. I wanted a field photograph, so that everything in the frame was in focus. For color on the street, I would have to step back from my normal eight foot distance to about fifteen feet. Color film was so slow—it had an ASA of 25, whereas the black and white was 400, but we rated it at 1600 and processed for it so we created a faster film. In black and white, you could have greater depth of the field. So if I wanted that depth of field in color, plate photography would give me that focus from eight feet in front of me to infinity. That way buildings and sky, flags, trees, people, everything was there. And, I wanted to make large prints. 40-inch prints, back then nobody was doing that. Making large prints with the 35 millimeter was difficult because I had to make an inter-negative from the positive Kodachrome slide. That process lost 30 percent of the Kodachrome quality from being in the enlarger and copying it on a sheet of film. The prints didn’t look good. And I felt this frustration.

I was already printing color. I was the only photographer I knew in New York who had a color darkroom, because back in 1968 I built one. I was jumping ahead. I knew, this is coming, I’m going to do it, I’ll get one of these color enlargers. I’m not a very technical person. I had a great Leica enlarger. I didn’t need anything more, but it didn’t print in color. I realized the only way to get everything in a negative is to shoot large format. I tried some larger format handheld cameras, but they were unwieldy, the lenses were slow. And they really got in the way of immediacy. If I’m putting something on a tripod to get this kind of description, I thought I might as well get the biggest camera I could find. I actually went to find a 20 by 24 inch camera. But I couldn’t get the film from Kodak unless I bought the entire production run. But I didn’t have 25,000 dollars to do that! So I found an 8 by 10 camera.

After I spent my first two weeks of a whole summer on Cape Cod, I flew back to New York, processed all the large format film, made contact sheets, saw a couple of beauties and went to the lab to make forty inch prints. I rolled them up and took them right to MoMA. I push-pinned these forty inch prints on the wall and waited for John to finish his call. I can still see him standing in front of them. He turns to me, and slowly drawls, “Why so big?” So, I took out the little 8 by 10s that I also had. He says, “They’re little jewels.” I pointed at the ones on the wall, “They’re big jewels. They’re windows, John. You can stand in front of it. There’s no grain. There’s nothing between you and it. It’s spacious. I could make these eight feet across and there’ll be no loss whatsoever.” He argued that nobody has room to collect big photographs. I said, come on, big paintings are in museums. He just couldn’t see it.

Rail: But you did start making really big photographs. Legacy beautifully shows the trees of New York City parks.

Meyerowitz: That was 2009. Sometimes you’re in a place in your life in which you just know the time is right, the concept, the desire is right, but there’s no place for them. Frankly, I didn’t have the money to go for it on my own. I was a working guy, and I had two kids. I didn’t have the wherewithal to make the prints myself. Especially if nobody wanted to show them! There was only one photography dealer in New York at the time, Lee Witkin. LIGHT Gallery opened up two or three years later. But everyone kept saying, nobody has big walls. Lee loved the 8 by 10s; he sold hundreds of them. But, back then they sold for one hundred dollars apiece. Anyway, it’s just one of those things, and I was in the right place at the wrong time. I just had a show in Paris. All the pictures were six or more. And they’re gorgeous prints. It’s a small gallery, but they managed to use their wall space in a way that makes it work.

Rail: What are you working on next?

Meyerowitz: I’m doing a book now on contemporary street photography—something different than Bystander: A History of Street Photography that I did with Colin Westerbeck. I decided to pick a handful of the best street photographers and each of those seven will choose between six and eight people they know. So it keeps fanning out. But the guideline that I gave them was that humanism is at the core. I want to see if we can re-engage with humanistic tendencies. I don’t want the cliches of Instagram. One has to grasp the potential of the moment, to read the moment as it’s unfolding, and recognize some capacity of telling within this moment. The moment isn’t just the thing in front of you, in the middle of the frame, it’s everything in the space. How does the thing that’s happening in the front relate to everything in the back? I want to see people who are interested in the way human beings live today, in this moment in time. It’s a challenge I posed. Now we’ll see what they do.