The Brooklyn Rail

Joel Meyerowitz’s photography career began with an epiphany: watching legendary photographer Robert Frank at work convinced Meyerowitz that street photography was his own true calling. Meyerowitz became instantly enamored with how, as he says, “the fluidity of photography could create instances of visual intensity charged with poetic revelation.” At the time, Meyerowitz had a burgeoning career as an art director, but he made an impulsive decision to quit his job and follow in Frank’s footsteps. This anecdote opens his latest book, a self-described “photographic memoir.” Throughout the book, Meyerowitz (in dialogue with his friend Lorenzo Braca, a historian and photographer) speaks eloquently and passionately about a variety of photo-related topics. Their series of discussions, divided into nine chapters, traces Meyerowitz’s artistic development over the course of his career. The result is a breezy, joyful, and intellectually stimulating read that offers insights into practically every aspect of the medium.

Meyerowitz has tried his hand at a wide variety of genres, building bodies of work around street photography, portraiture, landscapes, and still lifes. These works are featured throughout the book (over one hundred photographs total), appearing when they are apropos to the discussion. The focus is not on his best-known images per se, but rather the ones that best complement the conversation. As a result, while it’s squarely focused on Meyerowitz’s output, The Pleasure of Seeing draws the reader into a wide-ranging philosophical reflection on the nature of the medium—and of art in general. For his part, Braca does an excellent job spurring Meyerowitz’s reveries and reflections while also coming up with solid insights. His prompts and questions provide the artist with a solid scaffold to build on. During one exchange, Braca brings up the postmodern concept of fragmentation as it relates to street photography, then uses that as a means to springboard into a conversation on how Meyerowitz distanced himself from traditional “decisive moment” street photography early on. “You moved the focal point, quite literally, from a central subject or event to the overall scene of the street,” Braca asserts, pointing out that Meyerowitz’s images, rather than capture the moment, focus instead on the “flux of dynamic life.” This gives Meyerowitz a chance to discuss, in both practical and conceptual terms, how he developed his aesthetic approach.

In Meyerowitz’s view, the photograph functions as a kind of Zen kōan: a “momentary fragment torn out of everyday reality and made into a photograph, which can then expand in your mind to become everyday reality again.” To that end, the artist creates photos with open-ended, complex meanings that reveal themselves gradually. The images also embody what Meyerowitz terms “the poetry of chance.” In one color photo, Florida (1967), the viewer’s attention is immediately drawn to two women on the left side of the frame. Just behind the woman in the foreground, a bikini-clad female appears, a kind of free-spirited doppelganger. In a large automobile on the right, a driver’s short-sleeved arm rests on the passenger seat. It takes a moment longer to note the forearm on the far left, indicating the presence of another man. Like many of his best works, it is an exploration of the boundaries of the still frame, and of the tensions between form, light, and color.

The conversation is most effective when it deep-dives into a specific photograph or project. It reaches a kind of crescendo in the next-to-last chapter, which focuses almost exclusively on Meyerowitz’s 2006 book Aftermath. Arguably his most politically charged work, Aftermath documents Ground Zero in the wake of the World Trade Center attack. Meyerowitz details how he gained access to a site off-limits to everyone, including the media, while conspicuously lugging around an unwieldy large format camera. In the process, he provides a sense of the level of conviction needed to take such risks. “Aftermath was fire in the belly, and in my brain, and heart,” he tells Braca. “Sometimes [at night] I would get up and I would just think, ‘I gotta be in the site’ … so I would just get in my gear and go down and work until dawn, because I had a hunger for it.”

Yet, as candid as Meyerowitz is about his photographic process, he provides very few glimpses into his personal life. During a discussion of his classic 1978 monograph Cape Light, he asserts, “I was trying to make [the book] as personal as possible,” but there is little elaboration on that point. Instead, the conversation shifts to the editing and sequencing of the work. I would have liked to better understand how his experiences with his family on Cape Cod informed his perspective and his photographs.

When he does make connections between his life and his photography, it pays off. His reminiscences about his summers waiting tables in the Catskills when he was a teenager are illuminating and charming. In one anecdote, he recalls how, after his shifts ended, he would stick around to watch popular Jewish comedians perform, developing a lifelong love of Jewish comedy and observational humor. Back at work, he would recreate their bits to the delight of the resort’s guests.

This anecdote is punctuated by a monochrome photo from his rarely-seen 1963 series on Catskills resorts. In the center of a frame divided perfectly into thirds, a middle-aged woman in a gaudy outfit talks on a payphone. Through a doorway to the right, a man stands in the lobby. To the left, a large framed photo of an elderly couple hangs on a wall. While more satirical than his later work, it perfectly illustrates how the young photographer was, like the Jewish comedians he admired, becoming a keen observer of daily life, enthralled by its mysteries and absurdities.

The Pleasure of Seeing is not a definitive collection of Meyerowitz’s photography. (That would likely be his 2018 retrospective Where I Find Myself). But it is a compelling, highly readable, and intellectually rigorous account of an essential photographer’s life’s work that doubles as a kind of practical guide. It further cements Meyerowitz’s place as not only one of the most iconic photographers of the past fifty years but also one of the most insightful minds on photography and the endless interplay between image and meaning.