Europe At Speed: Early Street Photography from Joel Meyerowitz 1966-67

“I know that the experience of making photographs in Europe changed me and gave me the perspective I needed …to see America in a different way.”

– Joel Meyerowitz

 

Joel Meyerowitz was 28 when he embarked on a year-long road trip across Europe in 1966. His drive through ten countries and six months spent in the southern Spanish city of Malaga gave him a fresh outlook.

“I know that the experience of making photographs in Europe changed me and gave me the perspective I needed to see myself, and then,” he says, “when I returned home, to see America in a different way.”

 

Meyerowitz carried two cameras – one loaded with color film, and the other, with black and white. He often took photographs of the same subject in color and black and white. “If description is what photography is really about, then a black and white photograph misses something by removing color,” he says.

 

Meyerowitz took snapshots using a car window as his frame. When he returned to New York, MoMA hosted his first ever solo exhibition, featuring 40 photographs taken from the window of his moving car during his European road trip. This set of original prints are included in his current exhibition in Málaga.

‘This photograph [above], made from a moving car, became an important part of my way of seeing while driving 20,000 miles through Europe that year,” he says. “Things seen at 100km an hour are fleeting, and yet are often filled with meaning. It is nearly inexplicable in the moment, but later I would see how telling that moment really was. Here, on a winding country road in Corfu, this vision appeared, so close to me that the flapping of her scarf alerted me to their almost mythic presence.”

 

 

“In a way this was my first conceptual work. I thought of myself as sitting inside a moving camera on wheels, and that the window was the frame which showed me the continuous scrolling of events flying by outside. All those humble instants sped past me and left their heartbreaking beauty on film and in my memory.”

– Joel Meyerowitz

 

“On my first day in London in 1966 – a chilly August day – I was walking along the main streets around Oxford Circus and, just as I turned a corner, this woman with a candy floss hairdo came into view. I reacted just as I would have in New York City, and I immediately knew London would be fun to work and play in.”

– Joel Meyerowitz

 

“Ireland, especially its landscape, seemed full of myth and mystery to me, but it was the people who claimed my sharpest attention, often in subtle ways. Here, two young schoolgirls pass under the watchful gaze of a woman who, in that moment, seemed to experience the reverie of her own time, not so long before, when she too was filled with innocence”

 

 

The picture above of people at a Paris cafe is a favorite from the trip. As he says:

“Upon coming to Paris for the first time, I was struck by the nonchalance of the Parisian attitude, and how nothing would stand in their way when it came to sitting in a café for their coffee or glass of wine.”

…

“I look at that picture and it’s an absurdity – there’s no way for them to get away from the table! People are absurd and I think part of the joy of making photographs is that you run across this kind of insanity every single day in one form or another.”

 

 

 

‘This photograph was a real turning point for me at a time when I was learning how to see all over the frame at the same moment, rather than making the subject the centrepiece of the image. I was trying to handle all the complexities of life in a fraction of a second, by sensing the subtle connections between everything.”

 

See the exhibition Europa — Brilliant Early Street Photography from Joel Meyerowitz 1966-67 at the Museo Picasso Málaga.