Joel Meyerowitz

This Cultural Life

In this episode of This Cultural Life, photographer Joel Meyerowitz discusses his transformative journey from a painter to a pioneer of colo

Key takeaways

• Meyerowitz distinguishes 'making' a photograph from simply 'taking' one, emphasizing active composition within chaos.
• His father's background in vaudeville and sales instilled a lifelong value for human connection and communication.

Main topics

• Street photography evolution
• Influence of Robert Frank

Notable quotes

Making is what I think is the art of photography.

Conclusion

A profound exploration of how observation and presence can turn ordina

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:06) Welcome 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 Center in 2001, John Meyerowitz became the only photographer to secure access to Ground Zero and, over several months, captured the scenes of devastation. His 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. Speaker 3 (1:08) John Meyerowitz, welcome to This Cultural Life. Speaker 1 (1:10) Oh, I'm so happy to be here. Speaker 3 (1:12) I notice you have a camera on the desk in front of you. Do you always carry one? Speaker 1 (1:17) Always. Even if 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. Speaker 3 (1:26) I mean, we always have a camera now in the form of a phone camera. Has it made us more appreciative of good photography now that photography is ubiquitous, do you think? Speaker 1 (1:37) 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. Speaker 3 (1:59) I noticed you said make a photograph there rather than take a photograph. There is a distinction. Speaker 1 (2:03) 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. But 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. photography. Speaker 3 (2:33) 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? Speaker 1 (2:47) Well, I was the first of three sons from my poor mother. Speaker 1 (2:54) 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? Yeah, 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. They were out there playing dominoes and 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. Speaker 3 (3:58) Do you think it stimulated your visual imagination as well? Were you an artistic child from a young age? Speaker 1 (4:04) 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. Speaker 3 (4:18) And was your artistic imagination encouraged by parents and school? Speaker 2 (4:22) Well, Speaker 1 (4:23) it wasn't encouraged in the school. My high school was 4,000 students and, you know, roughnecks from the Bronx. We didn't actually get... And 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. Speaker 3 (5:02) So your father was spending his life out and about in the street. He Speaker 1 (5:06) 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. He was in vaudeville. He was a Charlie Chaplin. 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. 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. Speaker 3 (6:02) On 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? Speaker 1 (6:22) 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 the first 16-page booklet that was going to go out to advertisers. And my boss hired Robert to shoot the job. You know, Robert needed money and he did commercial work. I was going Speaker 3 (6:59) to Speaker 1 (6:59) say, because he was known Speaker 3 (7:00) even then as a sort of serious documentarian, but he was doing commercial work just to make ends meet. All of Speaker 1 (7:06) 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. Speaker 1 (7:22) 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, but 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. And 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. The 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. Speaker 3 (9:20) Well, this is just on the walk on the way back to the office. Speaker 1 (9:22) Exactly. The world looked differently Speaker 3 (9:23) immediately. Speaker 1 (9:24) 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. It 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 Speaker 3 (10:36) you know who Robert Frank was before you met him? You knew nothing of his reputation? I Speaker 1 (10:40) knew nothing of photography. I didn't look at photography. I was an artist. I was looking at paintings and sculpture and the history of art. Speaker 3 (10:48) 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. Speaker 1 (10:54) Well, his best... gift to photography, which I think is the greatest book of dark