VIENNA.- Kunst Haus Wien presents the first Austrian large-scale retrospective of the American artist Joel Meyerowitz, who made history as a pioneer of color photography and one of the originators of street photography. Featuring about 200 works from five decades, the exhibition traces the artistic development of the photographer whose multi-faceted work had a major influence on following generations of artists. Meyerowitz’s series From a Moving Car (1968) and Cape Light (1978) and his collection of portraits, Red Heads (19801990), were internationally acclaimed and are considered icons of photography, as are the dynamic street scenes he captured in New York and Europe.

Next to William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz (b. New York, 1938) was among the most important protagonists of the American “New Color Photography” movement during the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition presents a cross-section of his oeuvre, featuring representative groups of works from the 1960s to the present day and documenting Meyerowitz’s photographic idiom, which contributed significantly to establishing photography as an artistic medium.

Metropolitan Street Scenes
In 1962 Joel Meyerowitz, then a recent graduate of art history and painting, met the photographer Robert Frank at a photo shooting in New York. His subsequent decision to become a photographer himself marked the beginning of a unique artistic career during which Meyerowitz had his first success as an important protagonist of street photography. His interest in what happens on the street led him to capture fleeting moments with his 35 mm camera; his dynamic vision and style became hallmarks of the era. It is mainly scenes observed in the streets of New York, situations in which people interact, which Meyerowitz charged with new meaning and – unusually for the time – documented in color.

Meyerowitz’s penchant for experimentation was confirmed during a journey through Europe in 1966: once again, life on the street and in the cities is his subject, but he photographs his subjects in black and white and in color, often taking both versions of the same subject. His legendary shots assembled in From a Moving Car, taken from an automobile in motion, inspired New York’s MoMA to hold his first individual exhibition in 1968, featuring a selection of 40 works from this series. KUNST HAUS WIEN shows the original prints again as part of the current retrospective.

Deciding in Favour of Color
Joel Meyerowitz’s first book, Cape Light (1978), in which he examined achromatic variations of light on Cape Cod, is today considered a milestone in photography. Meyerowitz switched between a 35 mm camera, quick and easy to use, and a largeformat 8 x 10 inch plate camera, juggling color atmospheres and image details with sensitivity and precision. Studies of the light at the “blue hour” and images of the coastline show how color becomes the central protagonist of the photographs.

The artful way in which Meyerowitz captures the relationship between object, light and time is extended by another facet in his portraits. The direct gaze at the camera, the palpable presence of the photographer and the long exposure times create a fascinating immediacy in these images. The series of portraits entitled Red Heads was published in book format in 1990, assembling portraits of red-haired people taken over the course of ten years. The images of unpopulated swimming pools also date to this period – manifesting the duality of reference and image.

More recent works are marked by Meyerowitz’s interest in the remains of nature in its original form within cultured landscapes, as evidenced by photographic documentation of parks in New York (Legacy, 2006) or by his work as a chronicler of the cleanup of Ground Zero. After documenting city scenes, architecture, people and landscapes, the photographer has recently turned to still lifes, fixing simple objects in time using photography, for example those found at Paul Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence. The documentation and staging of found objects from the region in images that are arranged and photographed within the studio (Meyerowitz has been living in Tuscany for the past two years) brings the oeuvre of a gaze driven by curiosity full circle.