CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/25/2018

Teju Cole on photographer Joel Meyerowitz

Reproduced from Joel Meyerowitz: Cézanne's Objects, the diptych “Cézanne’s Studio (Skull and Void)” (2013) is one of five artworks that photographer and critic Teju Cole analyzes in a recent New York Times Magazine column on Meyerowitz’s career as a minihistory of photography. “A gray skull sits on a gray table with a gray wall as the backdrop. There is no supporting cast and there are no special lights, just the object itself, set down, more interesting for what it means than for how it looks,” he writes. “Joel Meyerowitz, nearly 80 now, must, from time to time, give thought to mortality. But the vision in his recent pictures (he has also made a series about objects in the studio of the painter Giorgio Morandi) is dispassionate, not tragic. Certain pictures are easy to make but hard to see. A skull, a table, a wall: In this latest of his numerous styles, Meyerowitz moves from what it means to look to what it means to have looked. The skull on one side of the diptych suggests it, and the void on the other leaves no doubt.”