American landscape photographer - he took up photography in 1962 and was one of the first to use color photography as an artistic medium.Preparing biographies
Biography provided by Focal Press
Meyerowitz enjoys a reputation as one of the most successful photographers to begin using large-format color materials in the 1970s when black and white was the palette of serious artists. Born in New York, Meyerowitz earned a degree in medical illustration and painting from Ohio State in 1959 and eventually took a job as an advertising art director. As part of his art directing job one day he had to accompany Robert Frank on a location shoot. Meyerowitz says his life changed completely after that (1963). He began using color slide film and then black and white film to make "street photographs" (other influences were Cartier-Bresson and Winogrand). His rapid assimilation of many photographic techniques led him to purchase an 8 10 Deardorff that was exactly as old as he was. His first award-winning book, Cape Light (1978), included photographs that captured the essence of light and the nuance of color at the cape where sky meets water and sand seen through misty hues (at f/90 and 1/2 second). Meyerowitz’ other work includes lyrical views of St. Louis near the Arch, redheads at the cape, flowers, and work from Tuscany. Meyerowitz lives in lower Manhattan; on 9/11/2001 he was away from the city. When he was able to return to Manhattan, he took it upon himself to be the photographer for posterity’s views of Ground Zero and the long progress of recovery and renewal. His story of how he got exclusive access to the site of the former World Trade Center buildings should accompany his poignantly bittersweet photo-essay. The U.S. State Department has already circulated dozens of his complete exhibitions on this subject to tour the world. Meyerowitz has also co-edited a ponderous book on the history of street photography.
(Author: Ken White - Rochester Institute of Technology)
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409]
(Used with permission)
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Family history
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The following books are useful starting points to obtain brief biographies but they are not substitutes for the monographs on individual photographers. |
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Photographic collections are a useful means of examining large numbers of photographs by a single photographer on-line.
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| "I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it‘s got lots of accounting going on in it —- stones and buildings and trees and air -- but that‘s not what fills up a frame. You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there." | | "It‘s no different for me, photographing on the beaches of Cape Cod or photographing at the World Trade Center. I don‘t use my eye first. I use whatever senses I have developed to understand that I feel some kind of emotion…. I try to go to the place where the feeling is the strongest." | | "Photography is a response that has to do with the momentary recognition of things. Suddenly you‘re alive. A minute later there was nothing there. I just watched it evaporate. You look one moment and there‘s everything, next moment it‘s gone. Photography is very philosophical." | | "You know, he (Winogrand) set a tempo on the street so strong that it was impossible not to follow it. It was like jazz. You just had to get in the same groove… You know, if you hesitate, forget it. You don‘t have to learn to unleash that. It was like having a hair trigger. Sometimes walking down the street, wanting to make a picture, I would be so anticipatory, so anxious, that I would just have to fire the camera, to let fly a picture, in order to release the energy, so that I could recock it. That‘s what you got from Garry. It came off him in waves — to be keyed up, eager, excited for pictures in that way." |
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