Joel Meyerowitz: Into the Light

My notes from the MacWorld 2007 feature presentation by Joel Meyerowitz.

If you make a big leap in your artistic work, you often discover new potentials that are unexpected and were unanticipated
– for me this change was switching

The French call this time between the dog and the wolf, the tame from the savage, when day is done and night is coming
– a very interesting time to take photographs
– open the camera lens for a minute and let it drink in the light, you get a tonal resonance that can be astonishing
– go to the HP gallery outside and look at these prints, and how exquisitely nuanced they are

Working with the view camera allowed me to work with scale in a different way than I could with a 35mm camera
– with a view camera I was able to let go of the city/urban density and make images about figures in space and light play
– can make a print six or eight feed across and all the details are there

Any art form, if you practice it with the fullnesss of your heart and intelligence, will start to challenge you about things you thought you knew or took for granted
– when I used to take my camera out in New York, people came up and talked to me, I started to notice them in a different way because I was visible in a different way

People are like landscapes: skin has textures, light falls on them different ways, rich experiences are conveyed by the images

Since using that camera I have made many portraits, most of total strangers who in some way connect to me, and are somehow willing to risk
– social fabric gets broken for a minute

For about 15 years I had a studio in Chelsey, NYC
– photo of the World Trade Center and lower Manhattan
– seeing NY as if it was big sky country

I had a show scheduled for October 2001 in SOHO gallery, called looking south, NYC landscapes
– all images of the WTC
– a week before the event I was in NY printing in a lab (before I had good digital equipment)
– then 9-11 happened
– I came back to NY 5 days after the event

I dumped my gear and got within 4 blocks of the north tower, standing in a crowd of people
– couldn’t see anything
– a female cop told me “No photography, this is a crime scene.”

My thought was, no photos means no history. They have no right to take away this history from us. I had a sense that I am going to get in and make an archive that I give to the city of New York– did everything I could to figure out how to get around

I knew somone who was a commissioner in a Borough of NY, asked who could get a pass
– I got a badge and some papers from the museum, and was able to con my way in each day
– until I met some of the detectives, who instead of throwing me out took care of me: we exchanged cell phone numbers
– eventually I was badged as “mayoral photographer”

Prior to 9-11, I was given a book commission by my publisher to do a book on Tuscany where I had been teaching a workshop for 7 years
– I used the advance inside ground zero instead
– in Jan of 2002 I was able to begin going to Tuscany to do this work on the book, quite a difference to leave ground zero to go from that environment to Tuscany
– this put me in touch with the earth
– I had been standing on rubbles, conferences tables, bodies, all the contents and debris of the towers for so long….
– to stand on the earth, which was about the earth continuity, the seasons– I felt reborn
– I started going back one more time in the spring to ground zero
– some of the iron workers at ground zero were actually there when the WTC was built 35 years ago
– they were back to take it apart

Photo inside the sourth tower
– huge beams over the heads of the men working there
– in the middle of the image where the light was strongest, a void was there created by a stairwell
– a fireman came out and announced he had found the intact bodies of 5 firemen, and they were from the north tower
– a very striking moment

My role was to record the humble as well as the grand in NYC at ground zero
– inside that debris there were pieces of steel the size of buses
– the aftermath of this, to see what was razed: HUGE things had been sliding and scraping along

Took a picture of Eddie the construction worker that ran in the New Yorker, Joel ran into him later and he was elated, with multiple copies of the magazine

The name of my book is “Aftermath”
– that word means “after the harvest” when you cut down the fields and harvest the grain, that is the aftermath (math being harvest, crops or hay)
– then people would come and glean bits and pieces
– in a sense at ground zero, there were gleaners everywhere

There was an order, both to Tuscany and Ground Zero

Image on the mezannine level of the WTC, came upon student lunchboxes and coats lined up

The unsung hero of ground zero was the bathtub wall that was built to keep back the Hudson, everything beyond that is landfill now

The real heroes of ground zeros were the gleaner

the last column to leave ground zero was a metaphor for the last body out

On June 21st, I went back and spent a day inside that bathtub
– the silence in there was eerie

I noticed some grass growing up alongside a railroad track, that had been in a tunnel
– those seeds might have lain there 35 years before now again, seeing daylight and
– I concluded the book with that image

After this happened, I was invited by the same commissioner to make a photographic record of all the NY parks
– I have been going round and round to do this work
– I went to HP, said I am making an archive, similar to ground zero archive (85,000 pictures) and I think your new printers will make these images: want to collaborate with me and NYC
– HP has underwritten this project

What I found astonishing about NYC is our parks with nature and wilderness
– city parks are usually lawns and playgrounds and gazebos, walks (generally not nature, they are urbanized parks)
– but NYC has some wild places in it, amazingly powerful
– rocky coastline similar to Maine right in the Bronx

There are incredible assets and wonders

Little 4 acre island that no one has been on since 1965 since the boat “Typhoid Mary” was quarantined, and they closed the hospital there

This is my effort to show how much wilderness is available for people who really need to commune with nature

If you photograph people on the street, you need to be decisive
– everyone is entitled to be on the street together, it is public domain
– as long as you are not selling those images to an advertising agency
– if you lurk and sneak, you will get in trouble everytime
– you need to be Eddie: project decisiveness
– no hesitation, don’t take a zoom lens

For photos in a museum you don’t need a release, because you are creating art

Ratio of pictures
– you hear when they make movies they shoot 40:1
– when I’m shooting with a view camera, the ratio is much closer (between what I hoped for and want)
– out of a roll of 36, I usually print 12 or 14 images
– out of those, I make keep 3 or 4
– I shoot a lot so over time there are a lot of images
– there are ways of using things, editing, they play differently for different purposes
– something like a fifth

We all love technology and gadgets, but it is all there to support something else: our appetites, our creative processes, our experiments in the world
– I wrote the script for Pong on my first Mac and wondered why
– photography was a science, technology has always been there
– one should be able to ride on the foamy crest of technology and take all the energy that
– their science at HP makes my creative efforts more expressive, gives me a greater advantage
– I don’t have to get into the nitty gritty

I keep everything I shoot: more and more terabytes of storage
– it is important to shoot in the raw
– I shoot some digital but still mostly film
– the history that is embedded in the photographs is still worth keeping

Famous image taken by “Dirk” of Bill and Monica embracing
– example: after the scandal broke, he went through thousands of images to find that picture that became so famous
– other photographers shooting digital likely discarded their images and threw away history

With digital photography, sometimes people miss the real event when you are watching the viewfinder in the back of the camera
– I save my images and re-read the images over time
– and look for the things I might have been smart enough to take but not smart enough to recognize
– as an artists, sometimes you are slightly ahead of yourself in your instincts

Line from Robert Frost “The figure of home base”
– “we’re like giants hurling our experience ahead of us like paving stones, so that some day we will cut a path of purpose across them”
– so what we do instinctually we should somehow retrieve

How do you know when you ‘have the shot?’
– as human beings with instincts, we have a visceral ability when we are faced with something that is revelatory, has magnitude, beauty, you feel the kind of tingle in your viscera that speaks to you without mind
– I think I photograph in that state of openness, where I feel the sense of something before I actually think through what it might mean
– that requires language and something else
– on impulse, something comes that is the sweet spot
– if you trust that, all of you with your digital camera or cell phone camera is capable
– it has to have your thumbprint on it metaphorically
– make these quirky pictures and put them next to each other, and you have something that is YOU
– and then others will recognize that as your point of view
– accept your quirks as your identity

My first book 30 years ago was “Cape Light”

I have written my own archiving system database (with help) using Filemaker Pro (did that 10 years ago with Filemaker 2!)
– I am migrating to Aperture
– I am looking for something like that which is convenient
– I have 50,000 images available on there, many are on the web