The Berlin-based Galerie Hermann Noack in the Charlottenburg district is celebrating American photographer Joel Meyerowitz's 85th birthday with a comprehensive exhibition spanning six decades of work from one of street photography's most influential voices. The retrospective showcases the photographer's remarkable ability to capture the essence of urban life while remaining virtually invisible to his subjects.
Meyerowitz has long attributed his success to his capacity to blend seamlessly into his surroundings, making himself invisible while observing the world around him. For more than sixty years, he has immersed himself in the flow of daily life, using his camera to explore the inexplicable mystery of time, with his images serving as comforting barriers against its relentless passage.
The exhibition highlights Meyerowitz's mastery of capturing decisive moments – a suggestive glance, a fleeting expression, or a perceptive scene. From his earliest black-and-white New York photographs, Meyerowitz demonstrated an uncanny ability to freeze moments that would have been entirely different just seconds later. His background in art history likely contributed to his natural talent for creating controlled compositions amid urban chaos.
These street photographs reveal a particular kind of patience – the patience of those who feed off what they manage to perceive, treating each captured moment as an ultimate reward. Meyerowitz appears to be sitting on a bench when a man walks down a New York street carrying his royal poodle in his arms, or strolling among passersby in Luxembourg Gardens when a woman plays with her dog as it jumps to head height. He seems to be sitting at a bar counter when a smoking woman exchanges a mischievous look with him, or waiting in line for the next showing when a couple kisses directly beneath a "Kiss Me, Stupid" movie poster. Throughout his work, Meyerowitz embraces people's daily lives while making himself a protagonist of the street.
While Meyerowitz's early work was monochrome, particularly inspired by his encounter with Robert Frank during a New York film shoot, the young art history graduate began experimenting with color photography from his earliest days. Alongside contemporaries like Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, he participated in the 1960s movement to elevate color photography from its commercial associations to its eventual acceptance as fine art a decade later.
Through his lens, Meyerowitz revealed his taste for astute details that color inevitably accentuates. One striking example shows a woman photographed from below on New York streets in 1963, wearing sunglasses with a closed expression, carrying under her arm a crocodile handbag and a book with the evocative title "The American Character" – which she definitively embodies.
Meyerowitz's parallel practices in black and white and color photography, along with the questions each medium poses, found expression in a late 1960s series where he captured the same shot with two different films within seconds of each other. In retrospect, these paired photographs can be analyzed with surgical precision, revealing the power embedded in multiple ways of seeing.
As public spaces bear the marks of both small and large changes, Joel Meyerowitz's images overflow with social indicators, from the rise of capitalism to women's acquisition of rights. The exhibition presents several iconic female portraits from the 1980s in Massachusetts, from which a liberating freedom emanates, including Sarah from his "Redheads" series (1990): red skin, tawny mane, and magnetic gaze.
While Meyerowitz has an inevitable attraction to beauty, his photographs also bear witness to tragedies. The exhibition dedicates space to images from his series created in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He regularly visited the newly christened Ground Zero without authorization to document the heavy reconstruction work, creating portraits of workers who appear as tiny ants among the immensity of the ruins.
"Meyerowitz: A Retrospective" runs through December 16, 2023, at Galerie Hermann Noack, located at Am Spreebord 9a, 10589 Berlin.
