Joel Meyerowitz
[Photographer, b. 1938, New York, lives in New York.]
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.
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.
It’s important when photographing to see different things simultaneously. Because there is so little time in the photographic moment, it must be expanded by consciousness to let in as much as can be contained.
What I think is so extraordinary about the photograph is that we have a piece of paper with this image adhered to it, etched on it, which interposes itself into the plane of time that we are actually in at that moment. Even if it comes from as far back as 150 years ago, or as recently as yesterday, or a minute before as a Polaroid color photograph, suddenly you bring it into your experience. You look at it, 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.
For a street photographer like myself, randomness is everything, because that’s one thing the world has in abundance, and I am just passing through it with my snare. My camera is a snare. I can throw this sieve out there and I can capture things in it. And risking that gesture all the time is part of the joy of seeing, because I don't have to stretch a canvas, I don’t have to mix the paints, I don’t have to light the studio. I walk around in the world, which is bombarding me with sensations all the time.
On the street each successive wave brings a whole new cast of characters, You take wave after wave, you bathe in it. There is something exciting about being in the crowd, in all that chance and change—its tough out there—but if you can keep paying attention something will reveal itself—just a split second—and then there’s a crazy cockeyed picture.
