Viewers probably already know some of the photographs from Joel Meyerowitz’ European trips, like the one shot in a Paris street, where a man lies on the ground outside a subway entrance (Paris, France, 1967). Aside from this extraordinary color image, the archives of the American photographer are filled with lesser-known black-and-white photographs from the same era. Today they’re being exhibited at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, alongside a recent series of still lifes entitled The Effect of France, shot in his home in Provence and exhibited at Paris Photo last November..
European Trip: Photographs from the Car, 1968 features forty photographs taken in 1966-1967 by the American photographer during his trips across the old continent and beyond: France, Greece, Spain, Germany, England, Turkey, Bulgaria, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, even Morocco. These photographs haven’t been the subject of an exhibition since 1968 at the New York Museum. “During my European car trip in the 1960s, I often saw remarkable things fly by outside my window, things that would be gone had I stopped to go back to see what they were,” recalls Meyerowitz. “In a way the photographs in European Trip: Photographs from the Car is 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. Life along the roadside still whizzes by at 60 miles per hour, and even though we have all kinds of advanced mechanics, the camera continues to be the only instrument that makes ordinary things seem momentous when we glimpse them in passing and recognize their innocence and beauty.”
Comparisons are inevitable between this work and Lee Friedlander’s America by Car (2011), and while there are similarities, Meyerowitz avoids Friedlander’s car-window framing which made the latter’s series somewhat repetitive. With Meyerowitz, the subject remains the found object, here photographed diagonally with little respect to parallels and perpendiculars, his famously rigorous composition almost absent. Sometimes this is a good thing: viewers will discover that Meyerowitz isn’t always at the mercy of his classical, meticulous technique; you might even say that he let himself go here. The photographs are unlike the scenes Meyerowitz captures on foot, but many of them are intriguing nonetheless. A couple speeds by on a motorcycle. A veiled Moroccan woman holds her child’s hand. A Welshman stands arms crossed on the side of the road. Two Spanish dogs sit at the base of tree, while in France, another dog barks in front of a barn. Later, a young Greek woman wearing a bikini sits on the back of a passing convertible, her eyes so lost to the camera that we let ourselves imagine, for once, that Meyerowitz got out of the car to go talk to her.
EXHIBITION
Joel Meyerowitz – European Trip: Photographs from the Car, 1968
From April 18th to May 31st 2014
Howard Greenberg Gallery
Suite 1406
41E 57th Street
New York, NY
USA
(212) 334-0010
http://www.joelmeyerowitz.com
http://www.howardgreenberg.com
