CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/29/2015

Joel Meyerowitz: Retrospective

"The moment is everything to me! And it can happen anywhere; when I'm working on the street and there's a flash of instantaneous recognition, or when I'm standing in a physical space while the light is changing. If the moment doesn't enter me, penetrate me, and move me, I can't make a photograph. It has to have a visual component, where I feel the necessity of it. It's like I'm stabbed by the recognition, it is so precise and it enters so deeply, that I am its victim, a willing victim of this moment of transformation. Because what is art really? Art is ordinary life transformed through the medium of a human being, who experiences some momentary connection to it. And it's in that connection that art is formed. And so I walk around the world, waiting for something to penetrate my natural resistance and open me up. I seek this particular characteristic of openness to things. I don't want to merely make another good photograph, I want to have another experience of life being so thrillingly perceived that I am helpless in front of it, and I just say yes to it. In some ways I have always felt that photography was an optimistic art form. Because every time you press the button you say yes!" New York City (1978) is reproduced from the essential overview, Joel Meyerowitz: Retrospective. For information about Aperture's forthcoming new edition of Cape Light, continue to the book page.