Book Giveaway: A Question of Color
This week, an excerpt from legendary photographer Joel Meyerowitz's new book, plus another FlakPhoto giveaway!
I’ll keep it short so you can get to the good stuff.
I love to give away books, and I’m excited to do that again this week. I’m giving away three copies of Joel Meyerowitz: A Question of Color, which examines the photographer’s relationship to black-and-white and color in his creative practice. It’s a great read. I think you’ll like it.
There’s a catch: You must be a paid subscriber to enter the giveaway.
I don’t paywall anything in
, and yet 365 subscribers show their support by paying for my writing. That means an awful lot to me, and I want to show my appreciation to those folks. Thank you!For the free readers, I’m thrilled to publish an excerpt from Joel’s new book. It turns out he reads FlakPhoto, which is wonderful, and I’m delighted he agreed to work with me on this. You can learn about the giveaway and how you can win at the bottom of this post. And if you want to subscribe, you can do that here. Take it away, Joel!
“Whaddya want—color or black and white?” That was the question that confronted Joel Meyerowitz the first time he picked up a camera and loaded it with film. The year was 1962, and though he didn’t realize it at the time— and though the store assistant surely didn’t intend his inquiry to have quite such depths—the question would reveal itself as one trailing profound aesthetic and even existential resonances.
Unwittingly, on his very first day as an aspiring professional photographer, Meyerowitz had begun to engage with the Question of Color.
What Question of Color, you might ask. “Today there’s no issue about color,” explains Meyerowitz, sitting in his North London studio. “For young photographers, there’s no question about the validity of color, there’s no argument.” Color is now the default option for most photographers, professional as well as amateur, and color photographs change hands for vast sums on the art market: in 2011, a 1.9 x 3.6m print by the German artist Andreas Gursky fetched $4.3 million at auction, making it at the time the most expensive photograph ever sold. But in the early 1960s, when Meyerowitz first started looking through a lens for a living, there was a widespread prejudice against the use of color in “serious” photography. Color was for amateurs and the entertainment industry; black and white was the only option for “art” photographers. The words of the great U.S. photographer Walker Evans sum up the attitude taken by museums and galleries at the time: “Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely... These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar.”
Enter Joel Meyerowitz, then in his early twenties. “When I picked up a camera in 1962 I was a total innocent. I didn’t know about cameras, I wasn’t interested in photography. I was a painter who was making a living as an art director in an advertising agency.”
Then one fateful day his agency boss, Harry Gordon, sent him downtown to watch the shoot for a booklet that Meyerowitz had designed. The photographer who had been commissioned to take the pictures was Robert Frank, creator of The Americans (1958), one of the most influential photography books of the twentieth century. Meyerowitz was unaware of Frank’s work at the time but was entranced by what he saw that day as the photographer worked with his subjects. “With barely a word, he freed them to just be themselves, and then silently and effortlessly bent and swayed and slid in and out of their activities, which continued on in real time and real life.” Frank seemed able to anticipate what was going to happen next and to find meaning in each small action. When Meyerowitz returned from the assignment, he was a man transformed. Everything now looked different to him.
“Every simple gesture seemed to be loaded with potential,” he wrote of the transformatory effect of that first encounter with Frank in Where I Find Myself, the magisterial “lifetime retrospective” of Meyerowitz’s work published in 2018. Discovering that one could move and shoot at the same time was profoundly exciting to him. “For that was at the heart of what I had seen—movement, the physicality of it, the timing, the positioning. I played third base, I knew about that kind of movement: it was energy in the service of the moment, a moment that was unrepeatable and evanescent, and to me this new idea was called Photography!”
His conversion to the medium was so complete that he immediately quit his job. “Watching Frank work opened up a whole world of possibilities,” he says now. “When I went back to the office and told the head art director that I wanted to be a photographer and was quitting, he loaned me his camera. I went out and bought two rolls of color film. I didn’t know anything, I just thought: I’ll get some film. I went to the camera store and I said: ‘What’s a good film to get?’” And that’s when he was hit with the big question: black and white or color? Meyerowitz had no hesitation. “I said: ‘Color.’ The store guy said: ‘Two rolls of Kodachrome.’ I took them and read the piece of paper, which said something like, ‘If the sun has clouds in front of it, it’s this exposure,’ or ‘If it’s got sunlight and no clouds, it’s this exposure.’ I adjusted the camera on the street, I had no idea whatsoever, I was such a novice. And then when I got the film back the next day almost all the exposures were good, or good enough. So I thought: Oh, that works, I’ll remember those settings.”
An encounter over a lightbox would prove critical to the next phase of his artistic development. “I went to the laboratory to pick up the film, and while I was there looking at the slides on the lightbox, another young bearded photographer came in and worked on the lightbox next to me.” This was Tony Ray-Jones, the English photographer, who like Meyerowitz was in his early twenties and had a background in graphic design. “The two of us wound up looking at each other’s pictures and trying to talk about them, although we had no adequate vocabulary then. But there was something in our photographs that was interesting, and we were both art directors, so we had that graphics thing going on.
“We arranged to meet up and go out shooting together on the weekend. And that became our little two-person laboratory: learning how to work on the streets, how to get closer to people, how to be courageous and not be too shy, how to get our timing right so that when the event happened we actually were ready. Shooting color slides and then talking about them with our very limited language, we were able to enter into our own personal dialogue about how to behave on the streets and where to find our courage, how to get close and still be invisible, and even later how to analyze our photographs.”
Meyerowitz borrowed not just a camera from his old office but a projector too, which he put to good use. “Tony and I would sit on either side of it, about three feet from the wall. The projector would throw an image on the wall two feet across and we would just sit and stare at the picture, looking at everything in it, and say: ‘You should have been closer’; ‘You should have shot when the guy was lifting his hand, not when the hand had already fallen, the gesture was on its way up and you were indecisive.’” Meyerowitz’s father had worked in vaudeville and even won a Charlie Chaplin look-a-like contest, and walking the streets of the Bronx in this practiced entertainer’s company the young Meyerowitz had early in life soaked up a love of the street and learned to anticipate its random encounters and incidents. This childhood training would serve him well in his photographic career.
“We were beginning to see the physicality of photography, the balletics of it, as well as finessing the exposure, which required our memorizing what the right exposure was. In a way we were sharing a global understanding of the characteristics of film as well as the physicality of being out in public and trying to be in the right place at the right time, with your consciousness intact, and your grasp of all these important things that helped make a picture look like a photograph, because there’s a real difference between those two things.”
The youthful venturers felt no need to discuss the “Question of Color” at this point: Meyerowitz by his own admission knew very little about photography, having until very recently wanted to be an abstract painter, and was unaware of the art world’s attachment to black-and-white photographic image-making. “Neither of us had a sense of color not being the right thing. It was only later on, when we wanted to show our pictures to people, that we began to see that black and white was what everybody who was taking photography seriously was using. It was kind of crazy to us because I liked the immediacy of taking a roll of pictures to a lab and getting it back in the morning to look at. I couldn’t wait. And yet if it was black and white, you had to save up until you had five or six rolls and then process a group of rolls, contact them and then make prints.
“With the color slides you could project them on the wall so they were big. With a black-and white picture it was on a contact sheet, so it was like an inch and five-eighths. And you had to look at it with a loupe and it wasn’t as alive as an image on a screen that looked great for analysis purposes.”
Meyerowitz had no particular goal in mind—for example, getting his work in the papers or a book or on the walls of a gallery; anyway, at that time there was only one photo gallery in New York, in the basement space of an old Chinese laundry, on East 10th Street, The Underground Gallery. “I wasn’t thinking anything about showing pictures, I had no vision about what the end game was. All I knew was that I needed to be out on the street, feeling that kind of human interaction and the timeliness of it because when I watched Robert Frank work, every time the action in front of him had a high point, a moment, a gesture, an emotion, a flicker of vitality, he was ready—I could hear the click. Oh, the timing! He could almost recognize the oncoming moment before it happened, and it was that— the anticipation of it—that was exciting to me.
“I wanted to transpose that to the street at large, because I had always seen these tender or humorous or energetic human moments on the street, where things seemed to be powerful for one reason or another. I had no idea that photography was a kind of art form that would result in a book or an exhibition, I thought they were individual pictures at first.
“Anyway, color had the immediacy of quickly getting the picture back to look at. The idea of the dark room was foreign to me, but the longer I made photographs, the more I began to understand that this black-and-white thing required a laboratory, processing, making contact sheets and then prints, but I didn’t have the money because I was newly out of a job. In the early 1960s I was earning roughly 50 cents an hour, and this was in an elevated job where I was a graphic designer, so I didn’t have the extra money to spend on making prints. Whereas a roll of color film would cost $2 and it cost $2.50 to process, so for five bucks I had pictures to look at. And big. That’s why it made a lot of sense to shoot in color.”
Sometimes Meyerowitz and Ray-Jones would expand the audience for their viewing sessions. “We would go to Tony’s loft and get a bunch of our friends together and we’d project the pictures big on the wall. Eight or ten people would sit around and I noticed that no one ever got up to walk up to the wall to look at a detail to say: ‘What’s going on over there? How come she looks a little like a swan?’ I saw the relationship in a split second, but they’re looking at the whole picture like it’s a kind of entertainment, as if it’s a travelogue, and I thought: How do I get people to look closely?”
Around this time Meyerowitz made another important artist friend when he encountered fellow New York photographer Garry Winogrand for the first time. Winogrand was his senior by ten years and, though he was yet to find wide recognition, had already built up a huge body of work, as Meyerowitz discovered when he was invited to his apartment. “Everywhere, all around the rooms, living room, dining room, in the hallways, were these stacks of yellow Kodak boxes that held 250 sheets in each box. This guy had thousands of prints! He saw my astonishment and handed me a chunk of 200 prints and said: ‘Here, take a look at these.’ I remember sitting in a wingback armchair and flipping through these pictures—they were all 11 x 14—and flipping through three or four and then seeing something interesting and going back and looking at them again and placing them side by side. Recognizing in some primitive way that images could be connected to form visual phrases—like ideas!”
It provided Meyerowitz with a eureka moment. “At that moment I began to see that when you have prints in your hands you can study the relationships between them. It isn’t just a thing on a wall that’s entertaining, it’s there for you to consider and reconsider. But there was no way to make color prints at that time: they were expensive, they required an intermediate step between a slide and a print, you had to make an internegative, and all of these steps were more money than I could afford.
“And I thought: I’m probably going to have to shoot black and white at some point. By the end of 1962 I had been photographing for around seven or eight months. I thought: If I want to really up my game, I’m going to have to add black and white to my vocabulary, so I started to shoot black and white along with color.”
Winogrand advised his young friend that he would need his own dark room, so Meyerowitz developed a complicated system that involved him carrying prints, chemicals and water between the bedroom and bathroom of his modest New York apartment. “It was time-consuming and labor-intensive but it offered me this opportunity to have lots of prints in my hand so I could study them,” he says.
“But it puzzled me—why was there so little acceptance for color photographs? If I talked to John Szarkowski at MoMA or other curators there, it was as if color was this thing that was only used commercially or amateurs used it for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, or for some kind of event.
“I thought: How can I get people to accept that color has a lot to say for itself?”
Excerpted from Joel Meyerowitz: A Question of Color. Text by Joel Meyerowitz & Robert Shore © 2023 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London Reprinted by permission of Thames & Hudson Inc, thamesandhudsonusa.com
Win this book!
I want to get to know you better, dear readers. Submission is easy.
Tell me about yourself in the comments for a chance to win. Where are you based? Are you a photographer? Be creative and have fun with this. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!
I'll draw three random winners from the comments on March 12, 2024.
Postage costs are limited, so this giveaway is only open to U.S. and Canadian residents. I’ll announce our winners next week. Take care!
Splendid post! Great story w/ the connection to Robert Frank (I wrote my masters thesis based mainly on his book, more survey of works, Moving Out) and met Meyerowitz when I was teaching photography in Italy back in the 90's-00's. He was gracious enough to stop by with his camera and a quick Q/A w/ my students. As a photographer, currently working on my first book, your posts are not just timely but inspiring in the all the right ways. Bravo and Keep up the good work! Side note: I'm reading Bright Earth, The Invention of Color by Philip Ball. I cannot recommend this book enough for everyone- artists, photographers, historians and the like- just a marvelous treasure of seeing and understanding our human connection to color.
Hi Andy, I'm not "a photographer", but I love to take photos, on the street and in nature with my Huawei phone which has an amazing camera integrated. I used to shoot with a Panasonic Lumix camera, but as I get older I have to admit the technical stuff is getting harder to master and I just want results...(said with a measure of embarrassment but in all honesty!) I live in Montreal. I've been subscribed to your newsletter since the fall and am learning a lot from you, starting with your introduction to Saul Leiter, which was such a discovery for me. I also follow a number of others here incl Marcel Borgstijn, Dina Litovsky, Suzanne Helmet, Xavi Buendia etc.etc. The excerpt of Joel Meyerwitz' book is very inspiring. Thanks, yet another discovery for me. You mentioned that you are always interested in learning about new photographers... You may not have heard of the Quebecois Benoit Aquin who did for example, an amazing series on the tragedy of a train derailment in Lac-Megantic in 2013.