Joel Meyerowitz

Joel Meyerowitz began his career in the 1960s, photographing the streets of New York. Working in both black-and-white and colour, he used film to record fleeting and surreal moments. He has stated that colour ‘describes more things…when I say description, I don’t mean mere fact and the cold accounting of things in the frame. I really mean the sensation I get from things, their surface and colour, my memory of them in other conditions as well as their connotative qualities. Colour plays itself out along a richer band of feelings, more wavelengths, more radiance, more sensation.” 

Meyerowitz formulated what he calls field photographs. He moved towards a more non-hierarchical image in which everything in the image, including the colour, played an equal, vital role. His 1976 series, Cape Light is one of the most celebrated bodies of photographic work of the twentieth century. Taken using a large-format camera, Meyerowitz’ images of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, document the coast, small towns and their inhabitants with a great sensitivity to the scale and colour of the landscape. The expansive skies and crystalline colours produced a new kind of photography – slow, meditative and experiential. Meyerowitz is also known for photographing the aftermath of the September 11 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Centre, being one of the only photographers allowed access to the site. His most recent work has turned to still life and led him to photograph the studios of Cézanne and Giorgio Morandi.

Joel Meyerowitz was born in New York, in 1938 and studied painting and medical illustration at Ohio State University, Columbus. A pioneering figure in colour photography, Meyerowitz is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships (1971, 1978), alongside numerous honours including the Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal (2012), the Leica Hall of Fame Award (2016), the International Photography Hall of Fame Award (2019), the ICP Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement (2025), and the Sony World Photography Award for Outstanding Contribution to Photography (2026). He has published over fifty books, including Cape Light (1978), Taking My Time (2012), and A Question of Color (2023). His work has been exhibited internationally, including My European Trip at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1968); Cape Light at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1978); Joel Meyerowitz: A Retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2013); Joel Meyerowitz – Retrospective at Kunst Haus Wien, Vienna (2015); and Joel Meyerowitz 1962–1980 at Tate Modern, London (2023). Selected group exhibitions include presentations at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Meyerowitz’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and the International Center of Photography, New York, among others. Meyerowitz currently lives and works in London.