Joel Meyerowitz on the Street:
New York City, 1969 is truer to the improvisational tradition of street photography. The overall composition is not perfect, not particularly beautiful in itself–in fact it’s somewhat chaotic. We see a group of pedestrians on a footbridge in Central Park; a photographer with his back to us appears to be setting up for a fashion shoot. This ironic little joke on street photos–which are generally shot spontaneously with a hand-held 35-millimeter camera–becomes even more evident when one notices at left, outside the central composition, a shirtless man who’s just jumped off the bridge. This photo is less a unified aesthetic whole than a kind of fragment of time in which the photographer has caught a tiny visual miracle: the goal of many street photographers. The process the viewer goes through–uncovering an amazing but small incident, the man frozen in midair, within a mundane scene–duplicates the street photographer’s quest: to see the quotidian as a vessel containing the miraculous.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In the exhibition of Meyerowitz’s color work, Paris, 1967 offers a similar arrangement of diverse pedestrians, and gives the same effect of discovery. Several look toward a woman’s hat standing improbably on end at the top of a flight of stairs. It’s hard to understand what’s happened, how this odd position of the hat is possible–until we see a woman on the right holding her hat tightly to her head. We realize that a woman near the center has just had hers blown off by the wind, and that the camera has caught it as it’s about to descend the stairs. Even after this realization, however, the hat retains the quality of an apparition, a vision that makes the invisible–in this case, the wind–momentarily manifest.
Born in 1938, Meyerowitz grew up in a tough Bronx neighborhood. His father, a vaudevillian and a boxer, taught him to box at an early age. He “made me put my ‘dukes up,’ taught me some lessons of the street–taught me to watch,” Meyerowitz has said in an interview. “I lived in a ground-floor apartment, so watching the street was great entertainment. After all, the whole of street life in the neighborhoods was based on strut and gesture.” But he also recalls, “I was the kind of kid who stroked and loved everything. I would drag my hands over things, rough or smooth, and constantly hold things in my hands.”
New Orleans, 1963 is even more mysterious. A woman stands on a street in front of two gray walls that meet behind her; on each wall, just behind and above her head, is a black handprint. To her left a fire hydrant faces the camera; the spigot is open but dry, and its cover lies on the pavement. What’s happening? And does any of it explain her dour, almost angry expression? But despite the mystery and possible trouble, one feels that every part of the image is connected to every other, each element a different shade of rough, textured gray or brown.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo, “Paris, 1967” by Joel Meyerowitz courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago.
