Joel Meyerowitz interview: ‘Photography is a very optimistic sport’

Joel Meyerowitz was 21 when he landed a job as junior art director at one of the big ad agencies in New York’s Madison Avenue. It was 1959, advertising’s heyday, and every bit as glamorous and whisky-lubricated as the TV series Mad Men suggests.

“Mad Men? I lived it,” Meyerowitz says, recalling for me the day he was summoned from his desk to turn the pages of the creative presentation in a client meeting and, having watched the men in suits “do their bulls---, lying to each other”, he told his boss – agency head Ben Sackheim – that they hadn’t chosen the best work.

“I took the pack off the easel and laid it out. I said, ‘This, here, is the most interesting. The rest are familiar, ordinary. But this makes you look twice.’ Silence – I thought I was going to be fired – but then he said, ‘You know what, kid? I think you’re right.’ And from that day on, he took me wherever he went. I was the kid that carried the portfolio and who told him the straight talk. He taught me: instinct is everything. Say what you think.”

Meyerowitz is 82 now, a world-renowned photographer with 350-odd exhibitions under his belt and a string of awards to his name, but he has never forgotten that advice. His new book, How I Make Photographs, is all about following your instincts. As for honesty, “Well, it’s sexy, actually,” he tells me. “Honesty makes you hold nothing back. It makes you fully present.”

Presence is the secret to Meyerowitz’s photographs. His intense alertness to his subject – whether the glassy seascapes he made in Provincetown, Massachusetts in the 1970s, or the objects he photographed in Cézanne’s Proven?al studio in 2013 – is what makes his images clutch at you the way they do.

He is probably best known for his street photography: glowing, action-loaded slices of 1960s and 1970s New York. In them, several small things tend to be happening at once – a turned head, a sidestep, a slab of sunlight on steam – but they add up to something extraordinary.

He explains it best himself. “Once in a while,” he writes in the book, “we are startled by something… that makes us gasp with recognition of the pure beauty of that moment. The moment is already disappearing while the gasp fills our lungs and our minds light up. That is your photographic moment, and only you can know it.”

He began tuning into these “moments” in 1962, the day he oversaw a brochure shoot for the ad agency. His boss had hired none other than Robert Frank for the job, and Meyerowitz watched, astonished, as the legendary photographer ignored the rule about staying still when you take a picture, to move fluidly around the room, click, click, click, as he went.

“When I left,” Meyerowitz says, “the world was alive to me in a way I had never before experienced. Every gesture, every incident on the streets seemed to have meaning.”

Six decades on, the world is still revealing itself to him in that way. He tells me his wife, the British writer Maggie Barrett, “says I always have this childlike look of wonder; as if everything that happens is a happy surprise. I tend to be optimistic anyway, but photography is a very optimistic sport. You press that button, and you’re saying, ‘Yes. Yes, I saw that. Yes, I want that.’ ”

He traces his optimism back to his Bronx childhood, a “wild, Huckleberry Finn existence, wading in the Bronx river, trapping animals and so on. It was rough and tumble and joyous.” In the book, he describes how his father, Hy, a vaudeville dancer and Charlie Chaplin double-turned-truck driver, salesman and professional boxer, “would often whisper, ‘Joel, look at that,’ or ‘watch this’. And wherever he pointed, something would happen. Somebody would slip on a banana skin, or bump into a pole… he taught me to read the street.”

From the outset, Meyerowitz took pictures in colour, a daring choice at the time. “But why wouldn’t you,” he says. “I mean, the world is in colour.” There were practical reasons too: black and white film cost more and took longer to process. “And I was so hungry to see what I could see.”

Dispensing with fedora and overcoat, he became “a street kid”, cultivating a beard and growing his curly hair long. “I was wiry, physical,” he says. “I moved quickly.” There were other photographers working the streets at the time and Meyerowitz soon fell in with them: Garry Winogrand, Tod Papageorge, Gordon Parks and Diane Arbus – they formed a sort of pack.

His first pictures, he tells me, “lacked any kind of bump. But then I noticed that hiding out in the corner was often something much more interesting than the thing I had been trying to capture. I could learn to pay attention to those things, I realised, and I was hooked.”

He absorbed this lesson, he thinks, from Rubens (Meyerowitz studied medical illustration and painting at Ohio State, and toyed briefly with becoming an abstract expressionist). “The energy of his paintings, their raging dynamic. They have a central theme, but simultaneously they have sub-themes, and street photography is all about simultaneity. To hit two or three targets as they are unfolding in front of you is a much more interesting way of being alive.”

Seven years ago, Meyerowitz and his wife exchanged the mean streets of Manhattan for Italy, where they rent an old hay barn on a working farm in the Tuscan hills. “Plenty of baaa,” he laughs. They also have a pied-à-terre in London, near Hampstead Heath, from where they decamped when the pandemic began.

He’s found it hard to make photographs in the months since – “This malaise we’re all under. It’s suffocating” – but has begun rifling through old bodies of work and made plans for his exhibition at Tate Modern next year. He’s also managed a self-portrait every day since January 1, taken by setting a timer on his camera and then going about his daily life “as if I have my own documentary photographer in the room”.

They capture simple, ordinary acts: “me flipping an omelette in the air – no kidding, that happened – or hosing the garden down, or carrying logs. These are moments that slip by us on a regular basis and yet still they have some kind of wonderful meaning. Don’t you agree?”

Joel Meyerowitz: How I Make Photographs (Laurence King, ￡14.99) is published on Sept 3