Joel Meyerowitz

is well know internationally as one of the great street photographers of our time and is likened to Stephen Shore and William Eggleston. He is best known for his sensitive photographs of people and situations. His way of handling light is still groundbreaking.

In this short video he talks about his “Retrospective” show at the Hôtel des Arts – a Toulon where he presents more than 140 photographs of the last 50 years.

He says “Photography has taught me many things. I feel that I’ve been a servant to photography. Its given me back whatever I could understand from its gifts and demands.”

One of the first things he learned from working on the street was “that when the moment arrives you just have to make a picture of the moment and often the frame itself isn’t a perfect frame. Its isn’t a perfect Cartier-Bresson classically organized frame” Joel says “it’s got a different kind of energy, its clumsier, it’s bolder.”

Though many would see his work as art, Joel looks at them differently, thinking of his pictures not as art, but as a fraction of a second in which his understanding and the world’s offering are unified in some ways that allows us to have a kind of open experience to share with whoever looks at the picture.

Almost mystically he summarizes his view of photography as “one of the strength of photography is that it show you were to go. By reading your images you begin more to understand who you are. I trusted right from the beginning that photography would tell me what my identity was, and offer me a path of knowing more about myself.”

Check out this recent interview post with Joel Meyerowitz as well.