Joel Meyerowitz Quotes

#1. A lot of what I am looking for is a moment of astonishment, he says. Those moments of pure consciousness when you involuntarily inhale and say 'Wow!'

Joel Meyerowitz

#2. Making any statement of your feelings is risky. It's just like making pictures.

Joel Meyerowitz

#3. Photography is a response that has to do with the momentary recognition of things. Suddenly you're alive. A minute later there was nothing there. I just watched it evaporate. You look one moment and there's everything, next moment it's gone. Photography is very philosophical.

Joel Meyerowitz

#4. [The small camera] taught me energy and decisiveness and immediacy ... The large camera taught me reverence, patience, and meditation.

Joel Meyerowitz

#5. I have to say, taking photographs is such an instantaneous act. The recognition and the acting on the recognition, depending on your equipment, is close to instantaneous.

Joel Meyerowitz

#6. I photographed the entire thing in color because to photograph it in black and white would be to keep it as a tragedy. Because there is a tragic element to photographing, in this case not war, but the collapse. It was just destruction.

Joel Meyerowitz

#7. We think of photography as pictures. And it is. But I think of photography as ideas. And do the pictures sustain your ideas or are they just good pictures? I want to have an experience in the world that is a deepening experience, that makes me feel alive and awake and conscious.

Joel Meyerowitz

#8. The thought for us [street photographers] was always: How much could we absorb and embrace of a moment of existence that would disappear in an instant? And, Could we really make it live as art? There was an almost moral dimension.

Joel Meyerowitz

#9. You look at it [a photograph] and all around the real world is humming, buzzing and moving, and yet in this little frame there is stillness that looks like the world. That connection, that collision, that interfacing, is one of the most astonishing things we can experience.

Joel Meyerowitz

#10. It comes down to risk, again and again. If you risk coming out, if you risk making pictures that aren't good, you might discover something in a photograph that is the key. The very doorway to your own interest.

Joel Meyerowitz

#11. Photography is about being exquisitely present.

Joel Meyerowitz

#12. I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography - that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.

Joel Meyerowitz

#13. One of the things I learned on the street was to trust life and to keep hands off of it, and that feeling continues in the rest of the works that I do, the portrait, the landscapes, or any interest that I have. Things are good enough as they are, there's no reason to tamper with them.

Joel Meyerowitz

#14. Then I thought, Whoa. If there are no photographs, then there is no history. I'm going to get in there. I'm going to make these pictures. We need a record.

Joel Meyerowitz