Joel Meyerowitz: A Question of Color 1962 – 2002
Tate Modern
20 November 2023 - 3 November 2024
Born in New York in 1938, Joel Meyerowitz began taking photographs on the streets of New York in 1962 alongside friends such as Garry Winogrand and Tony Ray-Jones, and is now celebrated as one of the most important photographers of his generation.
He was an early advocate of colour at a time when there was significant resistance to the idea of colour photography as fine art.
Posing a question, Meyerowitz used two cameras, one with colour film and one with black and white. He photographed the same scene moments apart not knowing which camera was which. The camera describes what is in front of it and colour images contained more description. The pairs of photographs in this exhibition state the argument that Joel made for the use of colour in photography.
Mother and Baby and Fish Window.
"Both of these frames sustain a touch of the absurd about them. Perhaps it's a toss-up which ones works the best. But the fact of the hour being the onset of evening, as described by the tone of the sky and the neon lights in the background, makes all the difference for me, as it gives me that extra bit of information about the moment this strange group came to be in the same place together."
Man and blimp, Florida, USA, 1967.
“This photograph tells its joke well in either black and white or color," Joel says, "particularly the double good fortune of the belly and the blimp, and then the ring-toss post and its place in the man’s shadow. But I feel the color image presents the whole place more fully. I read the sad conditions of the place through the spent green of the deck in sunlight seen against the similar value blue of the sky – as opposed to the near - equivalent grays in the black and white image. When I look at all the flat grays of the black and white print it all becomes duller to me, joke or not. I need to see the color of his shorts, that belly, the silver of the blimp, the color of the air and water, the tracery of the shadows on that pinkish tan wall. I hunger for the information that color holds!”
‘Colour film was more demanding (one’s exposure had to be perfect since there was little forgiveness, as there was with black and white) and it was much more elegant in the way it described things. The sharpness and cohesive quality of the image compelled me to “read” everything in the frame more carefully, as if that small “ping” of colour in the distance actually added something to the meaning of the whole frame and it did. … I had the sense that colours mean something to each of us, historically as well as in the present moment. We carry colour memories just we do smell memories..., and they evoke sensations, and from that recognition we developed our own vocabulary of colour responses.’
“This idea of ‘pairing Colour and B&W' had never been done before, and it was a crucial part of my youthful stance against the art establishment whose idea was that only black and white was worthy of being shown and that colour was amateurish or commercial, and was therefore unacceptable.”
Location: Artists and Society Wing on Level 2 of the Natalie Bell Building Bankside, London SE1 9TG, UK
The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication titled Joel Meyerowitz: A Question of Color by Thames & Hudson with text by Joel Meyerowitz & Robert Shore. Purchase here.
Montclair Art Museum
10 November 2023 - 13 October 2024
This exhibition will be the artist’s first solo show in a New York City area museum for many years. Drawn from a treasure trove of 201 Meyerowitz photographs donated to MAM by an anonymous corporate entity in 2021, this exhibition will feature 22 photos taken by Meyerowitz at Cape Cod from 1976 to 1987. His beautiful, serene photographs convey the finest nuances of color and light on the Cape’s unique juncture of sky, sea, and land.
28 October 2023
