Book Review: Joel Meyerowitz

Small moments

Phaidon are to be congratulated on their fine 55 photo series and now they seem to have corrected the major fault of all the original titles: at six by a little over five inches they were just too small. This particularly applies to the Meyerowitz title because so many of his photos are full of detail and when they appear one to a page at five inches wide the essence of the image is almost lost. This title is now available in the bigger 55 format (and this review appears on both sizes)

The photos run from 1962 to 1999 (the book came out in 2001) and the first three are in color when Meyerowitz was first experimenting with this new medium (for him) out on the street. Several photos show his ability to be at the right place to capture some quirky happening: a man getting tangled up with some cabling or a swimmer jumping of a bridge in Central Park while another photographer does a fashion shoot on the bridge. Some of the shots reveal his fascination with light and how it can change the mood of a color photo (he explored this more in the Cape Light book).

Overall I thought this was a fine selection of his work. Colin Westerbeck contributes a thirteen page essay and Meyerowitz provides a commentary on the photos as you turn the pages. This is certainly a plus because in most photo books the images are interpreted by anyone except the photographer. The printing uses a 175 screen on a reasonable matt art and this being a Phaidon book there is the usual odd bit of design: the page numbers are in a light face type and positioned at the bottom of each left-hand page near the gutter.

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Joel Meyerowitz