Joel Meyerowitz

Steve Pill: What is your ambition with the Masters of Photography course and accompanying book, How I Make Photographs? I’m sure you’ve had plenty of similar offers in the past so why this one – and why now?

Joel Meyerowitz: Well, nobody else asked before, so this is the first time. And I wanted to do something that was larger than an idea for a book, a broadcast… 34 modules of an online course allowed us to really develop a much richer body of thoughts about photography so that we could consider editing and book design and different kinds of photography, whether that’s street photography or landscape photography, portrait photography, still life photography, it had greater variety and Chris Ryan from Masters of Photography had a wonderful, generous attitude and in a way it was an experiment for both of us so we were able to evolve, over the course of three or four days that we spent together, ideas about how do you teach something that almost everybody on the planet thinks they know how to do, everybody with a smartphone has a camera in it and they make photographs and in some cases they are happy with what they make and in other cases they want to up their game, like going to a tennis pro or a golf pro, and so I function as the pro here who has 50 years’ of experience thinking about the issues that photography raises as you grow in self-confidence and your own vision, how do you identify your own special qualities? So we decided to talk about identity as being the real resource that we were going towards trying to bring to each person and open them up to being able to develop their own photographic identity.

One of the lovely things about your street photography, particularly from the 1960s and 1970s, is how blissfully unaware or at ease that people appear to be in the presence of your camera. Did you aid that with your body language or how you moved through crowds in any way?

I think every photographer who works the street – seriously works the street – gets the sense of how to become invisible so that you can be in crowds or close to people or within groups and move through or alongside of in a way that doesn’t bruise the engagement. In a way, you have to be passionate and excited about what you are seeing and how you feel, at the same time you have to keep a kind of cool so that you are just distant enough emotionally that you can continue to take it in and you’re not caught in such a way that the crowd or individuals in the crowd perceive you as someone who is stealing something from them or threatening to them in some way.

So yeah, as a street photographer, one learns to read the text of the street, which means the unfolding potential for meaning that is literally coming down the street to you in the form of unrelated sets of people – clusters, individuals, groups, the crowd itself. There’s a background, a foreground, there are front and centre characters. You have to be able to see in the play of the street the potential for the unseen photograph that you intuit might come into being because you put yourself in relation to it. For instance, I could be on the street and I’m just watching the crowd as I walk and up ahead of me I see two guys carrying a piece of plate glass window that they’ve brought from their truck and they’re going into a skyscraper to install it, and behind them is a woman carrying her poodle and a shopping bag, and closer to me there is a messenger on rollerskates weaving in and out of the crowd. Now, amidst everybody else, I identify those three things as “Ah, that’s interesting…” and I move my body in a such a way that I might be in the right place at the right time when those three elements somehow come into relationship – near and far, left and right, big and small, all of that. When I’m in an interesting and appropriate position, the photograph reveals itself.

So [it requires] a little bit of anticipation and reading the street, but also, as you indicate in your question, something about one’s body language is really important. You have to know yourself physically – just like an athlete who’s playing baseball or ice skating ready to execute a turn or a jump, you have to move your body so that it doesn’t alert or disturb any of the people you are moving [toward]. You have to be muscular, quick, silky, invisible in some way. 

I was interested to read in How I Make Photographs about your move away from “decisive moments” and towards what you called “field photography”. Could you explain a little about the practical side of how you developed that aspect of your work? Did you change lenses or shoot more, for example? 

This is a lovely question, thank you. You know, whenever you get good at something, it’s time to give it up and move along? I felt that at a certain point in my shooting life – I would say it was almost eight years into working as a photographer – I had already accomplished a few different bodies of work and I thought like, you know, is that all there is to it? Am I going to continually make pictures that [are] derived from the aesthetic of [Henri] Cartier-Bresson? There were a lot of us at the time [the late 1960s] who were using a kind of Bresson-esque way of looking at things and timing things and a kind of beauty to the frame, and I thought I don’t want to just catch the moment, that just makes me a visual athlete; [I wanted to ask] how can I go beyond this high point of a moment? I began to feel that life – this was in New York, mostly – was described by everything on the street, not just a decisive moment, but by the interaction of the people on streets, the quality of the clothing they wore, the colours of the dyes in the materials and the fabrics of that era, the look of the automobiles in the street and the buses, the quality of the skyscrapers and architecture, that material, the seasonal aspect, the time of day, all of these things are related factors in describing the time that we’re living in. 

I think I was probably very familiar at that time in my life with the work of Eugène Atget from Paris at the turn of the 20th century… and how, when I looked at his photographs, I felt myself there, in Paris, at that moment, and everything that he saw I was seeing with a kind of fresh eyes because the past is actually the present moment for the photographer and it inserts itself into our present moment so there’s a natural pairing that we do, we see it and we see where we are today, and so I began to understand that my photographs would carry this same message over time so someone in 2060 would look back at 1960 and see how the streets looked at that time.

At that point I had completely committed to shooting only in colour. I started in colour. The very first film I put in my camera was in 1962, it was Kodachrome, and that evening when I picked up my film and I was examining it on a lightbox in the lab, the kid next to me who was looking at his film was Tony Ray Jones, and the two of us became partners, we worked the streets together for almost two years, so we both were making our discoveries at that time, but my point is that awareness grows on every artist as you move through your experience and I decided I wanted more from my pictures than just a beautiful catch – and the only way to do that was using colour and to have the depth of field that I would have with, say, Tri-X and a 35mm lens. I could probably see from six feet to infinity in focus, and I wanted the same feel with colour but I couldn’t get it with the speed of film of those days, which was ASA 25 [ISO 25]. So I needed to find a strategy that allowed me to see more of the depth of the street and, instead of using a wider lens, I thought I had to step back, so by stepping back the depth of field was increased, the kind of imagery that I made wasn’t as intimate or as up close as before, and I began to see more of the interaction and the mix of all of these elements: light, space, time, depth, colour, action, individuals. The rich broth of this made, for me, what I call a “field photograph”. 

Would you say it is a better approach to either shoot a burst of frames to ensure you capture a scene unfolding or pay closer attention and choose that “decisive moment”?

Absolutely [the latter]. I don’t use a motorised camera – in the sense that I could put it on burst speed – I always make single images, and I try to see and live and be in the moment with whatever it is that is unfolding in front of me, and I never look at the back of the camera to see what the picture looks like. Never. To me, that’s instant death. When I [have made] a photograph, I make another photograph or I try to stay with the action, but if I stopped and I put it on play and looked at the picture then the thing that I saw which might have gotten better, I would have missed. So I urge all of you: take a frame, look at the exposure, see where you are, think about what you want for your depth of field or whatever, and then go and shoot, but don’t look at the back of it until later on, ok?

One of what I think is the underappreciated aspects of your work is the sense of humour in many of the images. Was it important for you to be amusing yourself with the pictures you made?

It’s not that it was important to me to amuse myself – what I recognised was that the world is crazy. People do the most ridiculous, unimaginable things and, when you walk around with a camera and you have a licence to see because you’ve got the camera in your hand, you’re witness to these kind of absurdities and so I found myself constantly entertained by human behaviour. The human condition is maaaaad. You’ve seen it yourself, people will stop in the middle of a crowded street, they’ve got their shopping bags, they’ve got their dog, they’re trying to get to their telephone, they’re standing on one leg because the back of their calf itches, people do balancing acts and turnabouts and interactions that are so fantastically, immediately funny that part of my timing and observational skills is devoted to observing this kind of human behaviour.

How important is in-camera cropping to the way you take photos?

It’s everything. I never think, “Oh, I’m going to get this home and I’m going to cut off the entire right-hand side”, you know? You’re given a frame in the camera, it’s a beautifully proportioned frame – 2 by 3 is the golden mean [the golden mean is actually 1:1.618, or 2 by 3.236], it is the frame that has served mankind in almost every art form forever and ever, and so working within that frame one learns to play the elements within the frame off the edges. It’s like a billiard table where you’re cannoning the ball off all the cushions so that it comes around the table in an interesting way and strikes the ball that you want and knocks it into the pocket. You didn’t have to do it as a straight shot; you banked the shot until it was a challenge for you. That’s what using the 35mm or any frame… The square frame has its own problems of working with and is also very interesting, and people solve square frame issues in very fascinating ways, but I think it is important to tune your instrument, which is your eye and camera – so that you know how to be in the right place at the right time and make those photographs fit the frame, because that says how daring you are, and how intuitive you are, and how creative you are, and how visually acute your way of looking at things is. It’s a way of saying, “I am a photographer and this is my identity. I don’t have to go home in a darkroom to cut off bits and pieces to make a fragment of a photograph, I’m good enough to make the whole thing now”.  

On the occasions where you’ve asked someone if you can take their picture, what are the surefire, practical ways of making a good portrait with natural light?

I think the question is: how do you know which person to go over and ask? And then when you do that, how do you do it in a way that they give you all of their respect and confidence, and they relax enough in front of you so that you get something of their mystery. And if you’re making a picture about mystery, who gives a shit about the light? I mean, it’s great to have nice light but I’ve worked so often in unpredictable situations where the light was behind somebody, bouncing off the ocean behind them, they were basically in shadow in broad sunlight, but it didn’t matter. The spaciousness of the glinting water behind them was another asset in the picture, so in a way, it’s a feeling that comes up spontaneously and one has to work within the spontaneity of the moment. The most important thing is to be able to get your subject to trust you to such a degree that they will give you everything that they hold in reserve for their private moments. 

Light was also a major factor in your Cape Cod pictures and you mention a series based on dusk. How did you collect these? Was it a case of scoping out locations during the day and then returning to them as the sun set? And do you have any tips for metering at that time of day when light is fading?

I’m the kind of photographer who feels that I can’t begin to think what it would be like later on. I photograph in the moment – that’s what determines who I am and what I feel in that moment, it’s what determines my interest and excitement when making a photograph. I rarely have the sense that, “Oh, this is a good place, I should come back here later on…” I’m not a collector of spaces that I take note of and then go back and visit them again and again and again. If I go to places regularly, like when I was photographing on Cape Cod, there were beaches that I went to with my family all the time, and that’s where I found the pictures. I didn’t go to other beaches to find the pictures, I went where I was happy going, and whatever pictures came up, that’s what they were.

The evening pictures came about because I was working with an 8x10” view camera and it’s always a long exposure with that camera anyway and I carried my camera with me wherever I want, no matter what. So when I would go out with my kids in the evenings [during] my early years in Cape Cod, things would happen. Kids have to go and play until the end of the day so basically I was out until the blue hour with them and I would see things and that camera, with its exposure, deals beautifully with fading light. The more time you add, the more energy you sustain of the light coming into the camera, and basically I found out I could see into the oncoming darkness and the camera would just keep it open enough so it would render all the information that was in there, and that’s the beauty of it, and that’s why I called it Entre Chien et Loup, “Between the dog and the wolf”, which is the French expression for the blue hour or the dusk. It means between the known and the unknown, really. 

As far as metering it, you just have to get good at it yourself. It’s a chance – you have to really read a light meter. Nowadays we don’t really read light meters because you’ve got a camera that sort of tells you if [the light is] good enough and then you can up the speed of your digital, whereas I was working with a film that was an ASA 80 and I just kept on adding seconds to it so the exposures were. And I generally shot at f/90, imagine that? So I was shooting my evening exposures at five seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes… It went on and on, depending upon the hour. After a while, you learn what it takes for the camera to make the right exposure. Generally with a digital camera, I try not to up the ASA [the US equivalent of ISO]. I would rather use time and light and a lower ASA so that I have a more refined image to work with.