“I wanted to show how New York City looked to me at that time,” Joel Meyerowitz says of the street photographs he took from the 1960s to the ’80s. “The activities, the clothing people wore, the quality of the buildings, even the light on the street.” These reflections, recorded over 18 months’ worth of interviews with historian Lorenzo Braca, are now being published alongside more than 100 classic and unseen photographs in the photographer’s first biography, The Pleasure of Seeing.
The book spans Meyerowitz’s formative encounters with Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander; his observations on how fashion, gesture and architecture have shifted over the years; and what these changes revealed to him about culture in the United States. The question that fired him, he says, was, “How can we deal with the absurdity of what we were seeing in America, back then, and with the transformation of the social system that we were living through? How does this play out on the streets?” From observing life – from the “very expensive business suits” to the “messengers” – he built a picture of the US that offers an answer.
