Listen: The Palm Springs Photo Festival Podcast, featuring Joel Meyerowitz
November 24, 2023I recently discovered the Palm Springs Photo Festival Podcast, and just listened to the episode featuring Joel Meyerowitz, originally published in November 2021. It was a great listen, in which Joel talks about his responsibility as a renowned photographer to share his knowledge; his friendships with Gary Winogrand, Tony Ray Jones, and Lee Friedlander; large format photography; and more.
His passion for observing the world is evident, and he spoke with great sincerity. A few of my favorite quotes are below.
On his responsibility to use his position to share knowledge with other photographers:
“I feel that throughout my life that whenever I have an opportunity to be in public, that is a real gift. That means the work has been interesting enough for people to want to know about it and I feel it’s my public obligation to communicate and connect.”
On comparing baseball and street photography:
“I read the street in much the same way as I played baseball… A team sport, especially an interactive one like baseball, where a lot of tension and waiting, you know, depends upon the ball being hit - I think that’s like photography in some way. And so I just used this intuition and I learned to read the street for my own purposes.”
On complex compositions:
“If you put stuff all over the frame, so that everything is coming at you at the same time but at different velocities, you begin to have a picture that has muscle and sinew and tension and energy and elasticity, and these are characteristics that make for interesting photographs, like language in way.”