Joel Meyerowitz: Temporal Aspects
October 4, 2024 – March 16, 2025
In 1962, Joel Meyerowitz (b.1938, The Bronx, New York; lives and works in London, England) made an instant life decision: to become a photographer. His fixed determination ideally suited his new instrument, the camera, defined by its ability to seize time and space in a thousandth of a second and hold it in an immutable frame. This exhibition celebrates NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale’s commitment to photography with its recent acquisition of over 1,800 works from the archive of Joel Meyerowitz, an artist best known for his early embrace of color photography in early 1962, which both preceded and facilitated a critical acceptance of the medium. Meyerowitz’s skill is evident in both the full, visceral descriptions of his color photographs, and the graphic and human subtleties of his black-and-white prints. More critically, Meyerowitz’s importance as an image-maker is defined by his ability to select the peak fraction of a second when shifting patterns, facial expressions and vibrations of light come together to form a complete image.
The world was formally introduced to Meyerowitz’s photographs in 1964, when MoMA’s Director of Photography, John Szarkowski, included a 25-year-old Meyerowitz in his exhibition, “The Photographer’s Eye.” The show included a vast array of contributors, ranging from 19th century masters such as Eugène Atget, to Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, Meyerowitz’s self-identified predecessors. The presentation was organized into five sections, each one dealing with one defining aspect of the photographic medium. Meyerowitz found himself in the section labelled, “Time Exposure.”
Fifty-nine years after “The Photographer’s Eye,” Meyerowitz’s work continues to be defined by his ability to capture what Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment.” This forthcoming exhibition illustrates Meyerowitz’s deft approach to capturing life on the move through a chronological and thematic arrangement. In having viewers progressively travel through the ages of Meyerowitz’s oeuvre, they witness a gradual progressive shift in the visual language which constitutes “the now.” This consideration builds on Szarkowski’s observation that the time in a photograph is:
[A]lways the present. Uniquely in the history of pictures, a photograph describes only the time in which it was made. Photography alludes to the past and future only in so far as they exist in the present, the past through its surviving relics, the future through prophecy visible in the present.
The exhibition also considers another aspect of time by including a selection of ‘work prints’ that addresses the durational life of the photographic print itself. By seeing what is typically denied from view, audiences may learn of the impermanence of the medium itself over time, such as the ways in which some colors fade and others remain, and how the construction and logos on Kodak’s resin coated paper come to define a period within the history of photography. Viewers are also gifted an intimate view of a photographer’s studio practice through prints featuring Meyerowitz’s personal annotations, along with a display of multiple printings of the same image, across which viewers may chart the artist’s progress towards achieving his ideal.
This exhibition is curated by Bonnie Clearwater, Director and Chief Curator of NSU Art Museum of Fort Lauderdale and Ariella Wolens, Bryant-Taylor Curator.
