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Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections > Photography Collection > New York Street Photography Joel Meyerowitz (American, born 1938)Born in New York City in 1938, Meyerowitz began taking photographs in 1962, shooting regularly with Garry Winogrand until 1965. In 1966, he had his first solo exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, followed in 1968 by My European Trip at the Museum of Modern Art. He received two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1971 and 1979, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1978. Although he is known today for his large-format color photography, in which he now works exclusively, Meyerowitz’s early black-and-white photographs share a similar irony with Winogrand’s work from the same period. Meyerowitz’s pictures, however, often seem more contemplative. This focused attention to the moment, akin in some respects to the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, was part of Meyerowitz’s initial inquiry into what made a photograph, “technically, compositionally, emotionally, temporally.” Such questions prepared him for the demands of color photography, of which he was one of the earliest and most successful proponents. “If you said of a photograph, ‘Gee that’s tough’ or ‘That’s beautiful,’ it meant that in the moment of making that photograph, you were beautiful.… The two words—‘tough’ and ‘beautiful’—became synonyms somehow. They were what street photography was all about.” Joel Meyerowitz World’s Fair, NYC, 1964 7 gelatin silver prints from the portfolio Joel Meyerowitz, The Early
Works (1999)
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