Madrid,
Joel Meyerowitz was born on March 6, 1938 at the Bronx in New York, as a member of a family of working class immigrants from Hungary and Russia; Those origins and that neighborhood would have to do with their first cultural and moral sympathies, with a concrete way of seeing the world to which it would shape.
Has defined his childhood as Chaotic but warmdescription that fits in part with the personality that transmits. His father had a great talent to imitate Chaplin, the result of an observation capacity that they shared: he used to look at street walkers, in human behaviors, in comedy and the absurd present in everyday life.
His first professional desire would be to be a painter. He moved to Ohio, where he studied art, art history and medical illustration, and then returned to New York; Here I would find employment as a creative director in a small advertising agency. He worked in the design of a brochure that had to be illustrated with photographs created for that purpose by Robert Frank, when his ambitions changed: the author of The Americans He seduced him for his good eye to capture life in moments and decided that he should focus on photography and that this would be the means that would allow him to read the street as he had never done, describe the ephemeral and take the gaze of others towards the unnoticed.
At first, he dedicated his free time to taking color photos with his 35mm accompanied by Tony Ray-Jones, at that time the creative deputy director of the magazine Sky and graphic designer. They arrived where there was a great agglomeration, not attending to both their reasons and the people who came to the place, who in those circumstances did not repair the presence of a photographer. He was also a friend of Garry Winogrand, and when he did not photograph with them he did it alone, especially on Fifth Avenue, his boulevard: No street in the world has for me the type of sexy and improvised collisions between elegance and simplicity. You can see messengers by bicycle and models, billionaires and scammers, and everything is outside every day.
One of those days, in 1963, Meyerowitz was with Ray-Jones photographing the atmosphere around the San Patricio parade when he warned him that he just Atisar Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had published a decade before he had published The decisive momentthe other great volume of influence in the Meyerowitz library next to The Americans. That book taught him to enter the matters of interest no longer to get behind, to get involved. The masses were their laboratory, and one and the other were evolving together since their self -taught impulse, projecting their slides and exercising mutual criticism.
That same 1963 married the photographer with the painter Vivian Bower and both began to travel together in the following years in the United States – especially Cape Cod and Florida – and in Europe, with the purpose of achieving a European version of The Americans. In Paris, Cartier would meet again (just in Robert delpire’s office, editor of Frank’s work) and in November 1966 Joellara would in Spain, without knowing too much about life in our country, but from Buñuel and Dalí.
He spent half a year in Malaga living together with gypsies and flamenco and, paying attention to his words, that stay transformed it: In Spain I somehow learned to be a man. There was something about masculinity (nothing to do with male’s attitude), about a way of being in life, which allowed me to become a photographer. I started understanding what it was to be looking at the world. I was free for the first time in my life. Spain fell very into me.
During these years from the second half of the sixties, Meyerowitz moved away from his first claim to capture the fleeting decisive moment, in which the subject’s action mattered more than the back A 35mm camera to a large -format of Large Sardorff Chamber.
From this period he now exhibits two hundred images, many of them unpublished and after passing through the Picasso Málaga Museum, the Fernán Gómez Center in Madrid, in the exhibition “Joel Meyerowitz. Europe 1966-1967”. They constitute a selection of the nearly 25,000 that he carried out in a dozen countries, sometimes from the window of his car, and many belong to that Malaga experience, which lasted six months, and are starring the Escalona, the family that welcomed him, one of the flamenco lines with greater tradition in the city. They make up an original registration of life in this context, in the stage of Francoist developmentalism: we will contemplate times of times and impressions in color and in black and white, in a journey curated by the new director of the MPM, Miguel López-Remiro.
Shortly after his Spanish adventure, in 1972, Meyerowitz would definitely say goodbye to the gray, committing to the color image, still taken by many by cheap, vulgar and not would be, in snapshots of saturated streets and luminous landscapes. Black and white became a thing of the past.
It would arrive Cape lightConjunction of portraits, landscapes and photos of the sea of Cape Cod, today a classic color of color: tiny figures on the beach, the railing of a porch in front of a sky dark by the storm, a blue raft against a summer cabin … are transformed by the luminosity of the place and the subtle vision of Joel.
In the nineties, already divorced from his first wife and married to the British novelist Maggie Barrett, he began traveling again in Europe, as he had done in the sixties and remembering old times, but now more frequently and especially for Italy, where he moved in 2014. He currently resides between New York and the Tuscan field, where he travels the markets in search of interesting objects and photographs In European impressionists. Today he has dropped for Madrid to give details of this anthology and to receive the 2025 Photospaign Prize, in recognition of his journey; He has collected it with humility, becoming part of another lineage: It is an honor to be part of the lineage of photographers that has received this award, with whom I feel very connected. I think we all share the vision that photography has a language, and the honor that supposes to have learned to speak it.
“Joel Meyerowitz. Europe 1966-1967”
Fernán Gómez Center
Colón Square, 4
Madrid
From May 15 to July 13, 2025
