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Joel Meyerowitz

For over 55 years, universally acclaimed, award-winning photographer Joel Meyerowitz has been one of the world’s greatest image-makers. Although Meyerowitz is a street photographer in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, he transformed the medium with his pioneering use of color. As an early advocate, he became instrumental in changing the attitude toward color photography from one of resistance to nearly universal acceptance. While Meyerowitz never felt constrained by any one discipline of photography, he says, “street photography was the only form of the medium that owed nothing to painting, it is purely photographic.” He feels that such a starting point naturally opens one to question the world around you, and questions are what lead us to make new kinds of photographs. This restless energy and open approach to subject matter has produced a huge variety of work These bodies of work deal with diverse subjects such as; light, portraits, landscape, cities, and history, all clearly diverge from street photography, yet manage to feel like his eye and ideas remain consistent throughout. Meyerowitz’s work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world, and he has published more than 25 photography books. He was the only photographer to gain unrestricted access to Ground Zero after 9/11, which produced a body of work that led Meyerowitz to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale for Architecture in 2002. Meyerowitz is a Guggenheim fellow, a recipient of both the NEA and NEH awards, an inductee to the Leica Hall of Fame, an Honorary Fellow of The Royal Photographic Society and a recipient of their prestigious Centenary Medal. He has taught at Princeton University in New Jersey and at The Cooper Union in New York.