Alongside his series Photographs from the Car, 1968, Joel Meyerowitz is presenting at the Howard Greenberg Gallery a new series of still lifes entitled The Effect of France. During a trip to Provence a few years ago, the photographer purchased a few curios for a friend whom he was on his way to visit in Tuscany. Once in Italy, these objects, which were almost unidentifiable, some looking like a hat or glass and metal bottles, took on a whole other dimension for the artist. “I saw their identity, so to speak, and began to put them, and a few other old objects I came across, into a kind of little theater space I created. After awhile, they seemed to step forward on the stage as individuals, and I found myself making ’portraits’ of them.”
These “portraits” of objects which make the series were mostly shot in faintly lit dark spaces, almost like a bow to Edward Weston’s pepper photographs. “In fact it was the funnel that Weston’s pepper was sitting in that suggested a tighter enclosed space to me as a place for these objects to stand in,” he explains. Not content with simple framings against a blue background, Meyerowitz began imagining other spaces to place these objects in harmony: old-fashioned interiors with dominant brown colors. “These objects seemed to have a new life, as if once more they could express something of their character, which is a touching sentiment to give to things that have been rendered useless,” he notes. These photographs, at once beautiful and banal, so different from his early work, remind us that Meyerowitz, since the 1980s, has put his impeccable technique in the service of a classical and more fixed brand of photography.
EXHIBITION
Joel Meyerowitz – The Effect of France
From April 18th to May 31st 2014
Howard Greenberg Gallery
Suite 1406
41E 57th Street
New York, NY
USA
(212) 334-0010
