Sara van Bussel You have a long lasting career, and your practice is very rich, with works that span from portraits, to street photography, to landscape, even reportage (911 memorial series). If you had to describe the single thing that they all have in common, what would it be? How would you describe your gaze, in toto?

Joel Meyerowitz I would say that my overall and general way of looking at the world is curiosity. 

I am interested in things that have photographic problems at their heart, such as, how does one find invisibility on the street, so that one could be free enough to make interesting pictures out of the fragmentary conditions that form contemporary urban life. But I also ask the questions: what is a portrait? Who is it of? How does one go about making it, or a landscape, or a still life?  How does one take on a tragedy the scale of ground zero, the 9/11 destruction of the towers? How does a single person do a reportage on something as big as that? 

So I think all along questions about the essential nature of the medium of photography have been what has motivated me to continue searching and responding. If I hadn’t had that kind of open heartedness about the medium itself and I made the same kind of street pictures over and over again for 60 years I probably would have run out of energy after 10 years. Because when you look at the history of photography many great photographers had merely 10 years more or less of active dynamic connection to the medium and then moved along. So for some reason this dynamic medium gave me an opportunity to reframe the question for myself so that I could stay interested.

SVB In the documentary La peau des Rues directed by Philippe Jamet, you talk about how the world of advertisement changes the perception of reality: shaping a fictitious one, tailor made to the consumer. I am fascinated by this idea of reality in general: is a captured reality more  ‘true’ than a constructed one? Is picking a fragment out of a scene from daily life less staged? What is in fact, ‘’truth’’ in photography?

JM There are photographers who use a kind of mise en scène to make their work. They create an environment, whether they build it or they use a found environment and they bring actors in and they have some kind of idea about a subject that they’d  like to talk about or visualize. I’ve seen quite a few of those kinds of pictures, and what always astonishes me about them is how boring  they are, how flat footed, how lacking in real human connection those tableaux vivants really are. They feel staged, as hard as they try to look like the real thing in a real place they always feel like overdramatized but under imagined in some way, whereas working on the street in the tradition of Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank or even Eugene Atget in his way and my own work, these are moments of pure perception, we could say, fleeting consciousness. When I am out in the street I am watching the panoramic movement of everything on the street in front of me, and I am trying to stay loose and open in such a way that when my senses tell me that there is something emerging from the flow of life around me. Relationships that are spread across the street and have nothing to do with each other but to me, from my perspective, where I could put a frame around the piece of the street and join a couple or a trio on one side and a single person somewhere else, if I can see that there is some fleeting meaning, something that is almost indecipherable but when you see it as a finished frame it seems to hold a kind of electrical energy, because it’s reality in the moment of transcendence. This may sound a bit Buddhist and spiritual in some ways but if you do it as I have for 60 years you begin to recognize that there are truths, and they’re really your truths, they are not about truth in general. The fact that I can see certain things because they are my response mechanism, they are in a sense the flavor of my life, they are almost like poetry.

What we love about poems is that if we read the work of one writer from poem to poem there are consistencies, points of view, reverence of life, understanding of nature, a connection to the human endeavors. There is a philosophy at work, and I feel that street photography, or ‘outside in the world photography’ that relates to your own sense of what’s important, and tests that day after day with a slow building up of images, manages to bring up all of this. Over a lifetime there may be 30 or 50 images in all that carry something of who you are and how you see the world. And so it’s this kind of essential distillation of the fragmentary quality of life in the 20^th and the 21^st century that is put on film or in pixels and held there for people to look at in the future, to understand something about who that person was, who existed in that time frame, and what was it that they saw that gives us some sense of meaning about that time. 

I understood that from looking at Robert Franks book ‘The Americans’, which was made up of all these fragments – 70 pictures – all of them adding up to 1 or 2 seconds of life, and yet they carry with them an incredible meaning.

SVB You talk about the idea that photography to you is capturing a time, freezing History as it unfolds in front of our eyes. As a medium, photography has immediacy as a fundamental power. A picture manages to capture something in a split second, Instead of a painting, which for example takes months if not years.  How do you take this into consideration when you work?  Since I know you originally started as an abstract painter, I am curious about this switch you made. 

JM Re reading this question I realize that my answer to the previous one also relates to this. The only thing I would add here is that I had been a painter, an abstract expressionist painter of the second generation. I started painting in the 50’s and abstract expressionism was already a flourishing concept in painting back then, I was trying to find my way out of that when I returned to New York to take up a life as an artist. But it became clear to me once I discovered photography in 1962 that I really much preferred the reality of the everyday world, and that pushing around blue into a magenta wasn’t really enough for me to stay interested in. It was an argument that no longer had meaning for me. On the other hand photography had a major argument in it. It was not accepted as an art form, it was considered commercial or amateurish, particularly in color, so my big argument was how do I break through the wall of resistance that only black and white was art in photography and try to convince the photography world that color was equal, if not more important, than black and white.

SVB When talking about your work, it is impossible not to come across the so called ‘question of color’, since you are recognized as one of the first to use it in photography. If I understood it clearly, however, the use of color in your practice is a very logical choice, since you see photography as something that, quoting you: ‘’has to document reality to its fullest’’.   Following this statement, I was wondering if you had ever considered film, since it includes all of the element that reality is able to offer: its people, their movement, color nuances. I then discovered you did indeed experiment with film, by producing the movie ‘pop’. How was this experience? What was the fundamental difference with your photographic work?

JM Working with still color film requires a commitment to making thousands of photographs, to really understand the way color works. Black and white is an abstraction and a reduction, and at the time the kind of understanding of photography was that if you pick up a camera and you press the botton what you see in front of you is just the description of what’s there. Description was and is a very important asset to photography. I felt, as a very young photographer, that if description is what photography is really all about but it’s in black and white then is losing the full emotional range and content that color brings to it. 

So my first argument was to try to revise this understanding, and you know, youth is the real avant garde because you don’t really care about what came before, you may love it and learn from it but you have to push away the past in order to make way for the present. So I was looking to not only educate myself but to educate the viewers that I was able to show this work to ( limited, believe me, back then in the 60s) by advancing the sense of what color can do, in the way it describes atmosphere, and skin tones, and the local radiance of the way light bounces around off of surfaces or reflects off of corners and the floor. How variant all of these tonalities are and how artistic this really is, in ways that we don’t actually describe when we look at pictures, we search for the meaning of the picture but yet the color is embedded in the meaning, it lifts the picture up because it renders everything. It’s like the full tonal range of an orchestra, that’s what color I think adds. 

As far as making film, when I made the film about my father it was done for an emotional and social purpose first of all. My father was living with Alzheimer and memory loss, and that felt to me, as it did for many in the 90’s, like it was the scourge that was happening to all of our parents. People who had lived through the Great depression and suddenly as they were aging this disease was showing up. We do not know what it is that brought this huge wave into the population of the world, and I thought as a conscious and loving son that if it escaped me as it was actually happening to my father how many millions of people are facing this. So I thought I am going to take my father out of this assisted living environment he was in, take him off his medication and see if I could shake him back into a normal existence and render that on film. It was really a road movie of my son, my father and myself, three generations of the same family, and the idea was to see how does this guy who is so infantile deal with world at its large? Is there something we can learn from seeing this so that we could be better caregivers to our parents or grandparents or whoever was suffering from this illness?

That trip with the three of us from Florida up to New York City back to the Bronx was almost a month long adventure, it was thrilling to see what happened to my father and the way he managed his own illness, the way he could cover it up and how he could still relate to people. The beauty of it was, it is shot on video, broadcast quality cameras of the 90’s, it showed a kind of everyday all through the day kind of life, of how it was like to live with somebody with this affliction and I truly learned a lot from it. 

I am now my father’s age from when I made that movie and fortunately for me I don’t have the same disease, but I hope that what I did for him – I actually know that the film was seen by over forty million people worldwide – that it was helpful to understand the predicament he, and other people, found themselves in.

SVB Connected to this question is also the idea of post production and the re-working of images. You worked analogically, was there ever manipulation of the image during the printing process? If not, how do you see this aspect in relation to contemporary photography?

JM I’m a very early user of the digital world. I had one of the very first photoshops in 1991, it was almost a beta, I had a digital print exhibition, the first of its kind in any museum at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993 and even before that in 1968- 69 I had the color enlarger in my own darkroom in NYC, printing 35 mm color and later on shooting 8 by 10 large format. I was making contact prints, I made probably 30.000 color prints myself. So I was an early advocate, because after all technology is what’s moved photography along, it’s a science as well as an artform so when the science aspect of it keeps on adding new devices to it it’s important to pay attention to those things. And I don’t mean just getting new cameras all the time, but in its larger form, how does this medium keep getting better and more interesting. So my 40 years of being in the darkroom gave me the tools to work in digital, I use photoshop exclusively now, I have given up the darkroom, 40 years of chemistry, chance and dark was enough, I prefer to sit at a big monitor and make my adjustments, just as I did in the darkroom, because there you interrupt the stream of light with your hands or filters, in photoshop you do the same thing. I am so deeply connected to a kind of critical sense of the reality of things that I don’t exaggerate, I shoot in a very flat way with a full rendering of what’s in front of me because I want it to be believable, I want the viewer to trust that what I am showing them is the beauty of the everyday world, not some kind of fantasy realm where I pushed things to make them overdramatized. That’s the kind of thing that, when I see it in other people’s work, I think why are you subjecting us to this kind of falsity. 

So I am very disciplined in my use of digital materials and tools.

SVB Relating to our current time, I remember reading in one of you interviews about the naivety that belonged to the sixties, in which fame was not something everyone could get, and thus the role of the photographer was different from today.  I would like to explore with you the idea of control: with the rise of selfies, of an aesthetic narrative that we can construct ourselves though social media, where is the role of the photographer? How does he-she navigate this new possibility given to literally anyone?

JM There is a big difference. Carrying a camera on your phone and using it is not the same discipline as someone who carries a camera around, using it by looking through the lens, setting exposure. It’s a very serious endevor and it takes a kind of discipline to work with it and to believe that what you are seeing and what you subsequently say will allow you to make a print as big as you want, 6 or 8 feet, to be in that moment of time creates each time a specific picture.

It’s really about being there and being conscious in the moment whereas there is a sort of generalizing product that the phone makes. The phone in itself is imperfect, people move it while holding it, the edges aren’t precise etc.  While with the camera, that frame is an articulate space that you are filling with your identity, and after all photography is a search for your persona, your character, and your poetry, is not a generic device like a smartphone which you wave around and click. A real photo takes a real intelligence, one that you do know, and you deepen, and select a picture and then print it. There is an ongoing discipline that allows for the photographer and the photograph to become one, so that when people see a thousand of your pictures they can say ‘that’s a Cartier Bresson’, they recognize the way of looking at the world. And that is truly, where the artform is positioned. 

The clarification of your own sense of meaning, the understanding of the reality of the time you are living, these are all a combined integrated effort on the part of the photographer.

SVB What do you consider a precious advice to offer to emerging photographers today?

JM I would say that we human beings have as part of our species intelligence and instinct.

If your instinct is to respond when you are out in the world, when something makes you turn your head, that is your instinct speaking directly to you, the person next to you will not have the same response, you have to learn to recognize and respect your instinct as a measure to your own identity.

 Learn how to listen to it and turn your camera there at that moment, that is the path towards understanding who you are and how photography can be yours precisely.

SVB Last question. Is there a picture you wish you would have taken but never did?

JM Yes there was. 

In 1996 I spent a year in Europe. I was driving through Ireland and I was on some country road with hedgerows as tall as 12 -14 feet, driving in a car that had American steering in it. I was going around a blind curve and above me, on top of the hedgerows, a man leaned on the wooden fence and vaulted over the fence flying the 10 feet down to the road with his arms extended and his coat flapping. 

I was coming around the corner and had the camera on my lap, because I photographed from the moving car, but I couldn’t manage the turn, the traffic and the camera on time. 

He was Christ like, in the way he descended to the ground and he landed absolutely beautifully, arms out. 

He is forever mid flying in my mind, I hold him there dear, as the one picture that I did not manage to take.That’s my sense of a lost moment.