Joel Meyerowitz

Nationality

American

Biography

Joel Meyerowitz American, 1938- Joel Meyerowitz began taking black-and-white photographs in the streets of New York during the 1960s, working with his 35mm Leica camera alongside Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. With the emergence of new technologies in the early 1970s, he successfully translated his vision to color images. In 1976 Meyerowitz further expanded his technical vocabulary by using a large-format camera to photograph in and around Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Published as Cape Light: Photographs by Joel Meyerowitz (1978), the series explores the manipulation of light and the full range of color available to the medium. He is also recognized for his photographs of St. Louis, commissioned by the city in 1977 and published four years later as St. Louis and The Arch (1981). Meyerowitz (born in New York City) studied medical drawing and painting at Ohio State University (B.F.A., 1959), then worked for four years in advertising as an art director. He had his first one-person exhibition at George Eastman House, Rochester (1966), and has since had similar shows throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1968), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1978). His awards include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1970, 1978) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1978), and a New York Creative Artists Public Service Grant (1976). In 1981 he was voted Photographer of the Year by the Friends of Photography. Meyerowitz lives in Manhattan. A.W.