Joel Meyerowitz

10 rooms in Artist and Society

This display explores Meyerowitz’s innovations in colour photography as he records the streets and landscapes of New York City and beyond

It’s as if the symphony of the street is truly engaged in the mind of someone who is photographing in colour.

Joel Meyerowitz

Inspired by the Swiss photographer Robert Frank, Joel Meyerowitz quit his job at an advertising agency in 1962 and started making photographs in the streets of New York City. Most photographers shot in black and white, but Meyerowitz chose to use colour film. He was one of the first artists to do so, which later led to the acceptance of colour photography as an art medium.

In the tradition of the ‘flâneur’ (a street observer who wanders without a specific purpose), Meyerowitz photographed the world around him with a borrowed 35mm camera. Later he also began to shoot in black and white, which could more easily be processed into prints. Colour slides had to be projected onto the wall. He says: ‘when you have prints in your hands you can study the relationships between them.’ But his view remained that ‘colour plays itself out along a richer band of feelings – more wavelengths, more radiance, more sensation’. In A Question of Color, Meyerowitz pairs black-and-white and colour prints of nearly the same scene to demonstrate this point.

Finding limitations when capturing details with 35mm colour film, in 1976 Meyerowitz began to use a large format Deardorff view camera. Working in this new way, he combined the spontaneity of street photography with a slower, more meditative approach. He says it was like ‘moving from jazz to classical music’. Displayed here are his images of the luminous light of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and the devastated site of Ground Zero, New York.

In his 60 years of photography, Meyerowitz has constantly reinvented many aspects of the medium, while always staying true to the humanism of his vision.

Tate Modern
Natalie Bell Building Level 2 West
Room 11

Getting Here

Ongoing

Free

Joel Meyerowitz, New York City, 1975 1975

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Joel Meyerowitz, New York City, 1978 1978

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Joel Meyerowitz, Bay/Sky, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1985 1985

The works from the Cape Light series show the first time Meyerowitz used a large-format camera to make large-scale colour prints. He shot the images on the coast and in the small towns of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Hartwig House, Truro, Massachusetts is taken inside a house, looking through the narrow landing onto a screen door through which greenery is visible. Porch, Provincetown, Massachusetts is of a porch at night, alight with an orange glow. Beyond the porch there is only sky and ocean, while a single lightning-bolt strikes far out on the horizon.

Gallery label, August 2024

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Joel Meyerowitz, An NYPD rescue worker, New York City, 2001 2001

The Aftermath series shows the destruction left behind after the 9/11 attacks in Lower Manhattan, New York. The images also feature firefighters, police officers and welders working on site to clear thousands of tons of wreckage and rescue any survivors. Cranes and other heavy machinery suggest the scale of the operation. Meyerowitz saw the importance in documenting Ground Zero as an act of both bearing witness and a type of memorialisation. He was the only photographer allowed to access the site, working almost daily from September 2001 to June 2002 with three cameras (including a 4x5 camera and a 35mm camera) and a video recorder. He produced approximately 8,000 photographs, many of which have been exhibited internationally.

Gallery label, August 2024

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