PARIS â€" A half century ago, when photographic purity was seemingly defined by the classical black-and-white images of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams and Marc Riboud, the American artist Joel Meyerowitz’s first step in his chosen career looked like a serious mistake: He shot in color.
“Most serious photographers were saying that color was for amateurs or for advertising,†Mr. Meyerowitz recently recalled by phone from Provence, where he and his wife have rented a house for the winter. “But I came into this at 24, and all 24-year-olds are rebellious.†Like the pop artists of his time, he said, he was “looking at comic books, advertising and there was this sense that everyday colorful reality was full of possibilities.â€
Seen through his eyes, it was. Now at 74, Mr. Meyerowitz is regarded as one of the pioneers, along with William Eggleston, Ernst Haas and Stephen Shore, in winning recognition for color photography as an art form in its own right. His most recent retrospectiv has opened at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, known as M.E.P., and runs through April 7.
“Joel Meyerowitz is the missing linkâ€, said Jean-Luc Monterosso, the director of M.E.P., referring to the gradual move of photography in the second half of the 20th century from black and white to color.
The new show displays 131 images selected from the 600 included in Mr. Meyerowitz’s latest book, “Taking My Time,†a sweeping overview of his career. “He was very involved in the selection process,†said Laurie Hurwitz, who co-curated the exhibition with Mr. Meyerowitz. “I wanted to create for the audience a trip through both my personal experience of 50 years but also the changes that photography has gone through in the past 50 years,†Mr. Meyerowitz said in an interview.
The show ! proceeds chronologically from 1962, the year he first picked up a camera and started roaming the streets of his native New York City to capture “momentary narratives†â€" a term he preferred to Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment.â€
He also spent a year in Europe. A 1967 photograph taken in Paris shows a man in a suit bizarrely collapsed on the pavement, a hammer-wielding worker stepping over his body, passers-by mesmerized but unhelping, snarled traffic frozen in time. “I appeared just like the man with the hammer: by chance,†Mr. Meyerowitz said.
He shot alternatively in black and white or color, often carrying two cameras at once, as shown a series of amusing, quasi-identical scenes juxtaposed two by two.
Then in the early 1970s, Mr Meyerowitz set up a large-format view camera â€" a huge wooden leather box on a tripod â€" on the sandbars of Cape Cod, and to this day remembers being “immediately smitten with a new sense of time and light.†The landscapes on view hee â€" “Roseville Cottages, Truro, Massachusetts†or “Provincetown, Massachusetts†â€" have shades of deep blues, delicate lavenders, pinks or tangerine colors that exude what Jean-Luc Monterosso calls “a poetry of lightâ€. Mr. Meyerowitz had crossed the color threshold never to turn back.
His subsequent street photographs, typically shot in bright daylight on Fifth Avenue in New York, vibrate with color, movement and an infinity of lively, sometimes comical details. Also included are panoramic prints from the early 1990s shot with three films in a large-format camera. “It’s fascinating because they were so innovative back then and in a way clairvoyant when you think of how today photographs are manipulated using digital equipment and software,†Ms. Hurwitz said.
A final section of the show includes a dozen prints selected from “Aftermath,†Mr. Meyerowitz’s body of work that documents the! titanic ! labor of clearing the rubble at ground zero after 9/11. It also touches on images of his most recent project, an effort to photograph the four elements, earth, air, water and fire. These, as all the other works on show, are modern prints with no glass to separate them from the viewers.
“I wanted them to be vulnerable,†said Mr. Meyerowitz.
