Joel Meyerowitz

0:06Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading creative people choose the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the photographer John Meyerowitz, a pioneer of the art form. He first began capturing life on the streets of his native New York in the early 1960s and helped to establish colour photography as a fine art medium. After travelling throughout Europe, he made his name with a groundbreaking show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. Following the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, John Meyerowitz became the only photographer to secure access to ground zero and, over several months, captured the seams of devastation.

0:51His work has been the subject of more than 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. And he's the recipient of many awards, most recently the prestigious Outstanding Contribution Prize at the Sony World Photography Awards 2026. Joel Meyerowitz, welcome to This Cultural Life. Oh, I'm so happy to be here. I notice you have a camera on the desk in front of you. Do you always carry one? Always. Even I'm going to the laundromat or the shopping, the camera's on my... You never know if you're going to see something of interest out there. I mean, we always have a camera now in the form of a phone camera.

1:30Has it made us more appreciative of good photography now that photography is ubiquitous, do you think? Well, that's an interesting question. I think what it's done even before that is it's given everyone, several billion people, an opportunity to make a photograph about anything, their food, their family, friends. It's expanded the culture of seeing in such a way that I think more people do appreciate photography. I noticed you said make a photograph there rather than take a photograph. There is a distinction. For me, there is. I mean, lots of people, most, the majority, take pictures of something because it exists and they want to frame it like it looks.

2:12But I think serious photographers try to make something happen out of the chaos of ordinary life or whatever they're looking at. Putting things together to work inside a frame is different than just centering an object and hitting the bullseye. And so making is what I think is the art of photography. Well, we're going to be exploring how you have been making photographs over more than six decades now. But let's go back to your childhood. You were born in the Bronx, New York City in 1938 into a working class family. What are your earliest memories of family life? Well, I was the first of three sons from my poor mother.

2:54And each of my parents had a large family. My mother came from, I think, nine children. My father from seven. So there wasn't a big extended family. We didn't all live in the same area, but we were within reach of each other in the Bronx and in New Jersey. Tenement life? Tenement life, but a kind of very joyous, open street tenement life. Because my entire block, one long block in the Bronx had 3 ,500 people on that block. And they were composed mostly of Italian immigrants from the South, Eastern Europeans, Irish, Jews, Germans, Poles. That was the working class substance of the block. and it was an outside life.

3:42They were out there playing dominoes in cards that women were shelling peas or tatting. I mean, it was lived outside. And I think it gave me a real foundation for the craziness of humanity. Do you think it stimulated your visual imagination as well? Were you an artistic child from a young age? Yeah, my father had gone to the Art Students League, hopefully to be an artist at some point, so he could draw. And so I think I drew as a child. I drew cartoons, you know, read the comic books. And was your artistic imagination encouraged by parents and school? Well, it wasn't encouraged in the school. My high school was 4 ,000 students and, you know, roughnecks from the Bronx.

4:31We didn't actually get an education. I don't know what it was we got. We managed to get out and everything. But I think, you know, my father's abilities to draw and to understand art and my mother's desire to cultivate her sons, she took me to the Met and to museums around Manhattan. We'd make the trek in on the subway from the Bronx. What did your parents do? My father was a salesman. My mother was a housewife. So your father was spending his life out and about in the street. He sold dry cleaning supplies to stores all over Brooklyn, Harlem, the Bronx, Manhattan. And so I would go with him, and he was a character.

5:16He was in vaudeville. He was a Charlie Chaplin lookalike, and he was a stand-in for Chaplin at some films that were made in the Bronx at the Gold Medal Studios. He was a comic and a song and dance guy. Wow. So I grew up with a guy who was outgoing and could talk to anyone. He was incredibly open, playful. And so I got a sense from my father that life was about communication, was about having a good time, making contact with people and engaging. And I saw him doing it and how easy it was. And I think it made me feel, oh, that's how you live. You connect to people.

6:02on this cultural life Joel Meyerowitz my guests choose the creative influences and experiences that have most inspired their own work and your first choice for this program is the great American photographer Robert Frank who you met whilst working as an art director for a New York advertising agency in 1962 what happened? so I was a young art director and my boss Estelle Ellis, had as a client Cy Newhouse and Condé Nast. And she convinced Cy Newhouse to make a magazine that speaks to pre-teenage girls. She invented this new market, and he started to make a magazine for it. And I designed a first 16-page booklet that was going to go out to advertise.

6:52And my boss hired Robert to shoot the job. You know, Robert needed money and he did commercial work. I was going to say because he was known even then as a sort of serious documentarian, but he was doing commercial work just to make ends meet. All of them were. All of these people had to make a living somehow. So I went down and Robert had found two pre-teenage girls in Stuyvesant Town, which is sort of lower east side along the East River. And I went there. He didn't pay any attention to me at all. I gave him the booklet, and he just took over. And at the time, I was a painter, and I was in graduate school for art history.

7:34But my painting was moving away from abstract expressionist tendencies to a kind of social concern. Living and working in New York, I began to see life on the streets as having high and low. And I wanted to see, what can you say about that? I was drawing every day. I'd go out at lunchtime with my sketch pad and try to draw these relationships. But it was frustrating and difficult. And when I saw Robert making photographs, I was astonished at how he was intuiting what was going to happen. He didn't so much direct the girls as sort of watch them, give them a little something to do here, you know.

8:17And then as they did it, every time something peaked, the way a girl looked at the other girl or she looked in the mirror at herself as she put on her makeup, something of concentration or beauty or a moment of transformation would happen. And I would hear the click of the camera just when it peaked. And I thought, how does he do that? How does he know that this is going to happen? And I understood intuitively that he must be such an observer of human behavior that he knows how to read the signals. He's anticipating. Yeah. And so when I left the shooting a couple of hours later and I stepped out on the street, I was in this wonderland where everything seemed to have moment.

9:07The way the bus pulled up to the bus stop and then the people got out and the way they were carrying their bags or the way someone lifted the child into the bus. Every gesture seemed beautiful. Well, this is just on the walk on the way back to the office. Exactly. The world looked differently immediately. I saw some guy jump into the street, literally, and throw his hand out. Taxi! He screamed. And that gesture seemed to have an eternal beauty to it. It looked like, you know, a discus thrower from Roman sculpture or a lancer. At least it was my fantasy. And I think by seeing the drama or the nobility or the tragic side or the comedy, it was so enlightening to me that I walked all the way back to the agency on 53rd Street and 5th Avenue.

10:02It took me an hour and a half. And by the time I got there, I was so full of desire to be on the street that I walked in. And my boss said, hey, Joel, how was the shoot? And I said, Harry, it was great. I'm quitting on Friday. And he said, oh, no. What happened? Was it a disaster, Joel? I said, no. Robert was so amazing. I never saw anything like this in my life. I have to become a photographer. I'm giving up everything else. It was that instantaneous. Did you know who Robert Frank was before you met him? You knew nothing of his reputation. I knew nothing of photography. I didn't look at photography.

10:43I was an artist. I was looking at paintings and sculpture and the history of art. For those who don't know the work of Robert Frank, just give a resume of the sort of work that he is best known for. Well, his best gift to photography, which I think is the greatest book of dark poetry of America, is called The Americans. It was published in 1958. Not too much a claim, more criticism than a claim, like what is this foreigner doing in America, criticizing the way we live? But each of these photographs of Roberts had something essential in it, some way of feeling the temperament and quality of life in America and told with a kind of cinematic flow, the relationship of one image melting into the next, page after page, had a sequential power to it, a potency that made you feel, as you looked at the pictures, it made you feel as if you were traveling, as he did, through the entirety of America and you saw in small towns and byways and highways, you saw a characteristic, an American characteristic that only this European man could see.

12:02It was like he saw through the facade of America to the deep, dark heart of the nation. And it so enlightened me. My boss, Harry, left just a month or so after I quit my job. He left to live in Europe the rest of his life. and his parting gift was to give me his copy, the French edition of The Americans. And so there was Robert whose gestures and energy gave me the inspiration and then a month later I saw his work. I thought, wow, I'm being double whammy here from this one person. So he became a role model. Oh my God. You studied his photographs. How did you get your hands on a camera though? Because that's a whole different game.

12:50Harry loaned me his camera. He had an Asahi Pentax. He pulled it out of his drawer. He said, Joel, do you have a camera? I said, no. He said, well, how are you going to be a photographer, schmuck? You need a camera. So I said, I'll get one. He said, here, use mine until you can get one. And so a few weeks later, I was able to buy a secondhand camera and begin to make photographs. Right from the very start of your photographic career, your subject was the street. Some of your earliest photographs were made of parades in New York, and what we see in some of these photographs are images of people isolated from the crowd.

13:35The context is often missing. What was your approach to these images, and what was the parade offering you? My co-worker then was Tony Ray Johns, who became a really great English photographer. Sighted as a big influence by Martin Parr on this program. Absolutely. Martin was thrilled by Tony's work. Tony was an art director, as I was, and when I was having my first two roles of film developed, the guy at the lightbox next to me was another long-haired, bearded guy like I was, and we began looking at each other's pictures, and we were both shooting in color, and we both were art directors, and we suddenly had this conversation.

14:16We didn't have much to say about photography, but we were yearning to develop our vocabulary. And so we decided right then and there that we'd go out shooting together. And this was Tony? This was Tony. And we thought, well, you know, in a week, this was in the very late spring or early summer of 1962, and that's when the parades happened in New York every weekend. And so we went to a parade, and we realized that the parade was cover, that we would be invisible in the parade. We didn't care about the parade itself, the flags and, you know, the drum majorettes and the people tossing stuff. We wanted to work the crowd, and we needed a little cover because two long-haired, bearded guys needed some disguise.

15:07So the crowds did that for us, or the parade did that for us, and we were able to begin to learn how to get close, how to get over our own shyness, because both of us were tentative, like, how do you do this? You know, we were new photographers. Even just learning the camera was what we were doing. There's one photograph from around this time, 62, 63, of two men on the street. One of them is holding a dog and grinning. The other one, an older man, has his hat over his heart in a sort of gesture of respect. he is a white man and the guy holding the dog is black. And there's so much going on in this photograph.

15:45That was taken at a parade. Yes, they were both watching the parade. The man who put his hand over his heart, the American flag must have been passing by. This guy was maybe an old soldier or something. And it was typical at that time to take your hat off to the flag and put it over your heart to show your loyalty or whatever. But it was the black-white play that was interesting because the black man had this huge dog, and he had a grin on his face. And something about the dynamic was more than just two people and a dog watching a parade. It sort of touched upon the tensions or the inequities in America.

16:29And for a split second, I saw that. And I think I had begun to understand that photography, although describing what's there isn't always telling a truth it's got shadings to it and if by by putting dissimilar things in a frame together you can make some kind of a context so it's about suggestion and ambiguity as well absolutely and i think ambiguity for me and i was learning that then was at the heart of the photographic gesture that even though it describes things precisely as is you are never really certain about what's going on so ambiguity is an asset and if you learn to use it well content how did you know what was going to work as a photograph did you acquire that sense of anticipation that you saw in Robert Frank that you almost waited for the moment and knew it was about to happen?

17:27Or did you only see the result? Did you know it was a good photograph after you'd got home, developed the film, printed the image? Both of those things come into play. You don't learn until you make the pictures and then you see what's a success. Or let's say, we didn't even call it success. Tony and I would say, oh, that's interesting. As opposed to, oh, there's nothing there. So if something was interesting, it meant that you got a grip on some characteristics or interplay or gesture, something. And then through time and looking at my work, I began to see, oh, I could be a little faster. Right from the very start, you were shooting on Kodachrome film at a time when colour film was regarded as not serious in the realm of artistic photography.

18:17Did it mean that you struggled to be taken seriously initially? Oh, absolutely. First of all, my cohort were mostly painters. I was only making some photographer friends by doing it. But all of my painter friends thought it was a waste of time. What are you using a camera for? Get that brush, baby. You know, throw that paint. And I was thinking, no, you don't understand. This little rectangle, you've got to act with the rectangle all the time. Because I guess in New York at the time, the heroes were Rothko and Pollock and people like that. Absolutely. They were the dominant strain of artists there.

18:51And they were my heroes, too. You know, I mean, Philip Gustin and Franz Kline, all of these people were heroic. But I was melting away from that. The human nature and the social commentary became so much more interesting and engaging to me. But if people were saying to you, you can't make it seriously as a photographer, if you're shooting in color, you stuck to your guns. Did you know that eventually things were going to change? I would think, what do they know? Really? I mean, it's exactly how I thought. What do they know? They're not making these photographs. I can see from Robert Frank's book and from being out on the street looking at life.

19:33You know, if you're in a studio making a painting and you're pushing around, you say, well, this yellow needs to be a little bit more red over here. I mean, those decisions are a totally different thing from being in the public and watching the way people glance at each other and send out the message of desire or anger or all the beautiful ways of expressing human emotions. I wanted to be in that field, assessing the meanings and the weights and the power of these gestures. Where's the right place at the right time? How do you move? It's ballet. and I loved to dance and I danced as a teenager we had little dance clubs we went to all the time and so the street was dance to me and I felt like I was dancing through the crowds trying to get to the right place at the right time.

20:34Well this question of composition brings us to your next choice of creative influence for this cultural life. is the 17th century Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens. How did he help you develop this sense of composition of the arts? Well, when I was in art school and studying art history and everything, of course, he was part of that time. But he mounted these gigantic canvases. He must have had a huge workshop. He was the Andy Warhol of his time. He had these gigantic paintings. If you see some of them, they were like 16 feet, 20 feet long. He was decorating palaces. And they were mythic stories of, you know, warriors and horses rearing and fallen maidens and people with lances.

21:19I mean, there was dynamic and action. And if you looked at them, you could see the energy coursing through them in long diagonals. I mean, it's classic composition, you know. And so all of that was so compelling that when I was out on the streets, I had a natural feeling of trying to use this kind of visual dynamism. Although there was no war and rearing horses, there were yellow cabs and people crossing the streets and running against the light and eating their lunch and carrying stuff. I mean, it was as dynamic on the streets of New York to me as those scenes in Rubin. So I loved the interlocking connections that you could see.

22:07We see that so often in especially these early photographs that you took in New York. It's the sort of simultaneous narratives competing for the viewer's attention, the different focal points within each image. I mean, here's an example. There's one called Gold Corner, New York, 1975. So actually a bit later, but it provides an example of several people passing very vibrant colors. Lots of movement going on. And they're passing a corner of New York. It looks like it's made from gold. I don't know. What is it? A bank or something? No, it was some crappy building that they put a plastic facade on.

22:40Oh, it's just plastic. Gold coffers. Yeah, it was plastic. But if you look at that picture, there's no action going on that adds up to anything. That was at a point in my life where I was trying to let go of the incident that the photographs were keyed to, to try to make an overall field of imagery. it didn't depend upon a singular action, a kiss, a look, a glance, a hug, all of these things that sort of were the spirit of the earlier pictures. I needed them then because I needed to hang my picture on some human endeavor. But at a certain point, I felt that I was able to let go of that kind of moment to try to see what life itself looked like And could I make an interesting enough picture out of the chaos rather than a moment in time?

23:38That's part of a series that liberated me from the decisive moment, let's say the Bresson period of pictures. He always had a moment that was the gear. You shifted that gear to get the picture to move. So I wanted to say, I want to let go of Cartier-Bresson and see if I could invent something for myself. You're talking almost like a painter there in terms of that composition. Did you stop painting when you took up the camera? I did, yeah, I did. I couldn't do it anymore. It suddenly felt like it no longer had meaning for me because abstraction required pushing these colours around. And, you know, my model for this was Philip Gustin.

24:20He was a great abstract expressionist painter. and at a certain point he just thought, what am I wasting my time shifting a little blue to a little grey? I could be painting these characters, cartoonish as they were, and the art world turned against him when he had his big show, but he actually led the way to a new kind of aesthetic in painting. And you never picked the paintbrush up again? No, never did.

24:54The next big turning point in your career, Joel, was travelling throughout Europe in 1966 and 1967, including six months living with a gypsy family of flamenco musicians in Malaga in Spain. There are some extraordinary images from this time. A horse falling in the street in Malaga, pulling a cart. I mean, it looks like it's just died. There's another one, a very similar one in a way, taken in Paris where a man is lying on the pavement next to the subway. and a whole crowd of people just seemed completely oblivious to him and were walking around him as if he's just sort of in the way. As if he was garbage on the street.

25:32There's a guy stepping over him. He's holding a hammer in his hand, which makes it seem even like a more interesting story. There's the ambiguity again. Yeah, did he knock this guy down or what? But, you know, to see the ruthlessness of contemporary life, these moments that happen when you're travelling on your own for a year, They're like gifts from the universe that teach you something about human nature and about your own ability to respond in a fraction of a second. You are documenting people's lives, telling a bigger picture about the way that we all live together. But in a way, you're taking something of those people for yourself.

26:12Don McCullum was on this program recently, and he was talking with such huge sense of grief and regret about photographing the people often in, well, usually in his case, in awful situations in combat and people being killed or maimed. Is there a similar sense of regret that you have at all of taking those images of those people for yourself? Really, because I wasn't, I get it from Don, and Sir Don is someone I really admire, the courage to go into those things. But this is just ordinary life on the street. People going about, you know, eating their lunch while they're walking. I'll have a bagel.

26:49I'll have an ice cream pop. I'll have a soda. I mean, it's ordinary life. It's sort of harmless. And people are abstracted from, you know, the jobs they do or the pressures they have or the family issues. And so they're out there and they're fair game. It's human nature that I was interested in. And this isn't human nature under the duress of war. This is just everyday life. Very different situation to Don McCullough. But it just reminded me of one image, which I think is probably from the 60s, taken over the shoulder. You're obviously on a bus, public bus, and looking over the shoulder of a woman who is holding a piece of paper on which she seems to have written a kind of a mantra, words of self-affirmation about how she's going to get herself through the day which suggests she's struggling I mean that's a very private moment that you capture there isn't it?

27:38Yes but look how telling it is because her little list of what she needed to do to bring herself up to feeling good let's say that's a list for everybody and so all I'm doing is seeing that in this private moment and someone is studying her mantra of what I need to do to survive, it's for all of us. That's poetry to me. Her list was like a poem. And so finding these tender moments is a kind of affirmation that human beings have gentleness and spaciousness and kindness and that these are things that I should celebrate and share with everybody else so that we all feel like we're part of the human race together.

28:26How did the experience of living in Europe for two years, traveling through whatever it was, 10 countries, 25 ,000 kilometers, how did it change your photography when you got back to the States? Oh, it really was eye-opening, because to be away from your own country and to see older cultures, long-established cultures, living within the context of buildings from the Renaissance or from early Roman times, to come back to America and see the paucity of history and the hardness of life and the efforts it takes to be an American and try and fulfill this American dream, it gave me a whole new way of looking at my country, which I took for granted before.

29:13But now I could see the holes in it. And so I started to really travel America, and I did two big trips around America, thousands and thousands of miles, photographing in almost every state in the country. While the Vietnam War was going on. In the context of the Vietnam War, yeah. But that return from Europe also coincided with a real life-changing opportunity when you were offered your first solo show at MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Was that the show that made your name, do you think? Well, let's say, it's the show that gave me a sense of accomplishment. Photography was nowhere in 1968, really.

29:56John Tsiarkovsky had just come to MoMA a couple of years before. He was trying to make photography fit in with the larger sense of art in the museum. He made a real strong program. But it still wasn't taken seriously. There were no galleries showing photography in New York in 1968. and there was not a big culture around it. A few of my photographer friends saw the show. People who went to MoMA saw the show. What mattered to me was that having made this work in Europe and the work being recognized by John Tchaikovsky, who was as sharp as they come, was important to me. And frankly, I'll be honest, I guess everybody aspires to make it somehow, to be in a museum.