12 Quotes by Joel Meyerowitz

Photography is about being exquisitely present.

Making any statement of your feelings is risky. It’s just like making pictures.

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.

You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.

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.

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.

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.

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!’

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.