Joel Meyerowitz

(b. 1938)


Joel Meyerowitz is a street photographer who's works are famous for introducing color as an accepted format for serious, fine art photography. He was one of the first proponents of color film and has worked with it exclusively since the early 1970's. His highly detailed and fluidly colorful photographs capture an essence of New York City, which is where he mostly photographed, that will never exist again. His prints are beautiful and his subject matter along with his unique look and accomplished technique street photography has earned him a well established reputation in the current photographic world.

Meyerowitz with born in the Bronx to Jewish parents. In 1999, Meyerowitz made a documentary about his father Hy named Pop. The film won some critical acclaim and is a good insightful into the personal life of Meyerowitz.

In 1962, while fulfilling the position of an art director and illustrator, Meyerowitz soon became bored of working in an office and soon became entranced by photography and being in the street. After telling his boss of his plans, his boss was surprisingly sympathetic to his wishes and even gave him a Pentax camera that he owned. This is what Meyerowitz started on as what later came to be a great career in photography. Meyerowitz really came into his own during the early seventies when color photography was beginning to become mainstream but still not accepted by the fine art photographic world, which still only viewed photographs to be artful when they were in black and white. Color photography was considered a thing of commercialism and advertising. Meyerowitz broke down these barriers and insisted that color was worthy of being artful in the street photography sense.

Meyerorwitz also began using a 9x10 view camera along with his 35 millimeter work. This proved to give Meyerowitz's work incredibly rich detail and texture. And the fluid, saturated tones of the color prints create a gushing, almost psychedelic quality to the photo's richness.

During the weeks after September 11th, 2001, Meyerowitz was the only photographer granted access to Ground Zero. The only photographs we have of the immediate aftermath of that event were taken by him and are now held by the Museum of the City of New York.

Joel Meyerowitz still continues to photograph and hold exhibitions in America and abroad. Along with Mitch Epstein, he is important for laying the foundation of photography's transition to color.