AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Color street photographs of New York and Europe, and calm 8x10 color pictures of Cape Cod
- Works in
- Color, mostly. In the 1960s he also worked in black and white
- Camera
- Leica rangefinder on the street; an 8x10 Deardorff view camera from 1976
- Also
- The only photographer given unrestricted access to Ground Zero after 9/11; co-author of Bystander: A History of Street Photography
- Start with
- Cape Light (Aperture, 2015)
- Links
Joel Meyerowitz (born 1938) is an American photographer from the Bronx, New York. He started on the streets of New York in 1962 and became one of the early champions of color photography as art. His book Cape Light, made on Cape Cod with a large 8x10 camera, is a classic of color photography. After September 11, 2001, he made an archive of Ground Zero for the Museum of the City of New York.
The story
In 1962 Joel Meyerowitz was 24 and an art director at a small advertising agency in New York. One day his boss sent him to a shoot. The photographer was Robert Frank. Joel stood behind him and listened to the click of his Leica. “After a while I began to see those frozen moments happened every time he clicked,” he remembers.
After the shoot he walked out into the street. People were carrying laundry and pushing baby carriages, the most ordinary things. “Suddenly each and every one of them seemed to me to be a heart-stopping moment,” he said. Back at the office, he told his boss he was quitting to take pictures. His boss lent him a camera.
For the next three years he walked the streets almost daily with Garry Winogrand. He bought his own Leica, an M2, after seeing Winogrand and Frank use one. In 1966 an advertising job paid enough for a whole year of photographing in Europe. “I was never happier and hungrier for the world to show itself to me,” he wrote.
In Paris, in the summer of 1967, a young man in a suit lay on the pavement by a metro entrance. People stopped and stared. A workman with a hammer was about to step over him. Meyerowitz caught it in a fraction of a second, on color film. “A photograph allows for such contradictions in everyday life; more than that, it encourages them,” he said later. In 1968 the Museum of Modern Art showed his pictures from the trip.
But the fast camera was not the whole story. In 1976 he bought an old 8x10 Deardorff view camera and took it to Cape Cod for the summer. Exposures now lasted from seconds to minutes. “I could make an exposure of the fading daylight, the oncoming darkness, the glow of street lamps,” he said. One of those evenings gave him Dairyland Sign, Dusk, Provincetown. The pictures became Cape Light in 1978.
The young man who once fell in love with a click went on to work in every speed, from a split second to five minutes. “Photography has given me my understanding of the world, my place in it and my philosophy of both art and life.”
The work
- 1938Born in the Bronx, New York
- 1962Watches Robert Frank at work, quits his advertising job and starts photographing the streets
- 1966Begins a year of photographing across Europe
- 1968My European Trip: Photographs from the Car at the Museum of Modern Art
- 1976Takes an 8x10 view camera to Cape Cod
- 1978Cape Light is published
- 2001Begins photographing Ground Zero for the Museum of the City of New York
- 2017Inducted into the Leica Hall of Fame
- 2026Aperture publishes the 50th anniversary edition of Cape Light
Lessons
Do not hesitate. When something catches his eye, the camera is already rising. He says every hesitation loses something.
Change your speed. After years with a fast Leica, the slow 8x10 camera taught him to wait for dusk and long exposures.
Look for relationships. In Paris the fallen man and the workman with a hammer have nothing to do with each other. Together in one frame, they make a new meaning.
Try this: spend one hour on a busy street. Each time something catches your eye, raise the camera at once, without asking “should I?”. At home, look for frames where two strangers seem to be connected.
Gear
Leica M2: he bought his first Leica after seeing Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank use one. With the M2 he could keep one eye on the rangefinder and the other open to the street.
8x10 view camera: a 1938 Deardorff with a 250mm wide-field Ektar lens, bought in 1976 with a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. He used it for Cape Light, on slow Kodak Vericolor film.
Leica digital cameras: in a text for Leica he lists an M10 for daily work, an S3 for portraits and commercial work, and an SL for video and some landscapes.
His very first camera was not his own. His boss at the advertising agency lent it to him in 1962.
Books
Cape Light (New York Graphic Society, 1978; Aperture, 2015 and 2026). His best-known book. Forty color photographs made on Cape Cod with an 8x10 view camera from 1976: motels, porches, beaches, cars and roadside signs at dusk, when daylight and electric light mix. The book includes an interview with Bruce K. MacDonald, then dean of the school of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It has sold more than 150,000 copies. Aperture's 50th anniversary edition (2026) keeps the original design by Carl Zahn. Start here if you want to see how color and light can be the real subject of a picture.
Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive (Phaidon, 2006). After September 11, 2001, no photography was allowed at Ground Zero. Meyerowitz was the only photographer given access, working with the Museum of the City of New York. The book holds about 400 of his photographs, made with large-format and 35mm cameras, of the ruins, the workers, the demolition and the long clean-up. It won the German photobook prize, the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis. A record of a city's loss, and of the people who cleared the site.
Where I Find Myself: A Lifetime Retrospective (Laurence King, 2018). A 352-page retrospective with text by Meyerowitz himself, made for a retrospective show in Berlin. It runs in reverse order, from recent work such as the still lifes from Giorgio Morandi's studio and his trees, back through Ground Zero, Cape Cod and the early street years. Good for readers who want the whole career in one book, in his own words.
How I Make Photographs (Laurence King, 2020). The first book in the Masters of Photography series. A small 128-page book of short lessons built on his own pictures: his influences, how he moves on the street, how he puts people at ease, how to choose a lens, and why play matters. Written for photographers who want practical ideas, not theory.
