Joel Meyerowitz Retrospective

I’m ashamed to say that after 20 years in New York I hadn’t heard of Joel Meyerowitz until I found this book. He is one of the founders of what we call “street photography,” long before it was fashionable. He was an employee of an advertising company, he saw Robert Frank’s photo book, The Americans, and figured he’d give it a try. Using a small camera, he started documenting the people on New York City streets, following that with a year in France and Spain, experiments with color and black and white photography, returns to New York City, and stays in Mexico.

This book is a retrospective, so you’re going to see a little of everything here. What fascinated me the most were his pictures of New York City in the 60’s, because I’m always keep to study the clothes and other norms of the time. Most of the people in his New York images look perfectly happy to be there, but then again, he wasn’t taking pictures in the Lower East Side, where things were lousy. I also noticed that almost all the photos contained no children, and that, I believe, is due to the old New York life. This city has always been popular with single adults, but it was never a good place to raise children. Until  around 2000, once the families started growing, they’d move out to the suburbs. New York City kids always had a reputation of being spoiled. Meyerowitz’ photos include the World Trade Center Site, which I didn’t find that interesting. I would rather have seen more about the people working there, and I bet they’d have stories to tell. But his photos pf Mexico don’t get much attention here. I bet they show a lot of sleaze.

Street photography has gotten a lot of attention in the last decade. Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York documents the improvised fashions of the city’s people, many of them children, so we can see how the average age of a New Yorker has changed.  Jamal Shabaz’ A Time Before Crack documents the style of Black Americans in the city in the early 80’s, though he didn’t publish it until 2005. I suspect that someone out there has a pile of photos they took in the city, way back when it was rough, and it’ll become a bestseller.