Joel Meyerowitz: A Question of Color

In this vibrant collection, Shore (Beg, Steal, and Borrow), former editor of Elephant magazine, and photographer Meyerowitz (The Conversations with Joel Meyerowitz on Sixty Years in the Life of Photography) delve into the latter’s early experiments with color photography, a form once deemed “vulgar” by “serious photographers.” Eager when he started out in the 1960s to “get people to accept that color has a lot to say for itself,” Meyerowitz carried around two cameras—one with black-and-white film, the other with color. What he found was that while certain shots were more “graphically powerful” when rendered in black-and-white, they often stripped away a texture and energy that gave the photo its beating heart: “the color pictures felt... much more expressive. They gave me more a sense of atmosphere, or time of day, or season.” Meyerowitz’s insights are abundantly clear in arresting shots of a segregated New Orleans trolley car, a scene with two women against a cerulean sky at a Fort Lauderdale yacht club, and a car covered by a red-and-white–striped tarp in Redwoods, Calif. Throughout, Meyerowitz pairs his shots with commentary that reveals the depth of his artistic philosophy, as when he suggests that “fragility of experience, that evanescence, is at the heart of the photographic moment,” and that “color photography satisfies the generosity of that moment.” This captivates. (Jan.)