Joel Meyerowitz famous quotes

04-19-2025

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

#Photography #Thinking #Ideas
Making any statement of your feelings is risky. It's just like making pictures.
-- Joel Meyerowitz

#Feelings
I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it's got lots of accounting going on in it-stones and buildings and trees and air - but that's not what fills up a frame. You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.
-- Joel Meyerowitz

#Thinking #Air #Discovery
I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photographyâ€”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

#Photography #Art #Believe
You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.
-- Joel Meyerowitz

#Discovery #Feelings #Risk
[The small camera] taught me energy and decisiveness and immediacy ... The large camera taught me reverence, patience, and meditation.
-- Joel Meyerowitz

#Meditation #Cameras #Energy
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

#Astonishment #Wow #Photographer
We all experience it. Those moments when we gasp and say, Oh, look at that. Maybe it's nothing more than the way a shadow glides across a face, but in that split second, when you realize something truly remarkable is happening and disappearing right in front of you, if you can pass a camera before your eye, you'll tear a piece of time out of the whole, and in a breath, rescue it and give it new meaning.
-- Joel Meyerowitz

#Eye #Giving #Shadow
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

#Acting #Recognition #Photographer
'Tough' meant it was an uncompromising image, something that came from your gut, out of instinct, raw, of the moment, something that couldn't be described in any other way. So it was tough. Tough to like, tough to see, tough to make, tough to understand. The tougher they were the more beautiful they became.
-- Joel Meyerowitz

#Beautiful #Way #Tough
What is the art experience about? Really, I'm not interested in making Art at all. I never, ever, think about it. To say the word Art, it's almost like a curse on art. I do know that I want to try to get closer to myself. The older I get, the more indications I have about what it is to get closer to yourself. You try less hard. I just want to be.
-- Joel Meyerowitz

#Art #Thinking #Trying
when you're on the street, and, as you're walking along, a woman turns the corner going away from you, and for an instant you have a glimpse of the side of her face, of the gesture of her shoulder, the shape of her body, and you are committed... You are in love for an instant, or your senses are rocked for an instant. That person then disappears and is lost to you forever...
-- Joel Meyerowitz

#Forever #Going Away #Sides
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

#Hands #Feelings #Portraits
I want to enjoy the languor of just living, recognizing, acknowledging, taking it in, sort of amplifying it in some way. [Photography] is a great medium for that. It happens in an instant, but it gives you hours or days of time to reflect on things. Itâ€™s a beautiful system, this game of photography, to see in an instant and go back and think about later on. Itâ€™s pure philosophy. And poetry.
-- Joel Meyerowitz

#Beautiful #Photography #Philosophy
Photography is about being exquisitely present.
-- Joel Meyerowitz

#Photography
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

#Real #Moving #Connections
It comes down to risk, again and again. If you risk coming out, if you risk making pictures that arenâ€™t good, you might discover something in a photograph that is the key. The very doorway to your own interest.
-- Joel Meyerowitz

#Keys #Risk #Doorways
They [photographs] teach you about your own unraveling past, or about the immediacy of yesterday. They show you what you look at. If you take a photograph, you've been responsive to something, and you looked hard at it. Hard for a thousandth of a second, hard for ten minutes. But hard, nonetheless. And it's the quality of that bite that teaches you how connected you were to that thing, and where you stood in relation to it, then and now.
-- Joel Meyerowitz

#Past #Yesterday #Quality
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

#Photography #Philosophical #Looks
I find it strangely beautiful that the camera with its inherent clarity of object and detail can produce images that in spite of themselves offer possibilities to be more than they are a photograph of nothing very important at all, nothing but an intuition, a response, a twitch from the photographerâ€™s experience.
-- Joel Meyerowitz

#Beautiful #Intuition #Important
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

#Photography #Needs #Records
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

#Photography #War #Black And White

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