CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/23/2015

Joel Meyerowitz: Retrospective

At last, a true retrospective monograph on the great American street photographer, Joel Meyerowitz. Not a single image in this book is less than great. "I worked from a kind of innocence at the beginning to a degree of knowingness now," Meyerowitz is quoted. "And along the way photography has taught me many things. I feel that I've been a servant to photography and it's given me back whatever I could understand from its gifts and demands. One of the very first things I learned working on the street was that when the moment arrives you simply make a picture of the moment, and often the frame itself isn't perfect. It's not a Cartier-Bresson, classically organized frame. It's got a different kind of energy in it. Perhaps it's closer, or bolder, it's more about the first connection between whatever is going on and you as the artist. I was struggling at that time to learn how to be in the moment. How close to get to somebody, how do I understand the significance of the moment?" Featured image is "New York City" (1962).