Biography

Joel Meyerowitz is known for Frontline (1983), To Write and Keep Kind: A Portrait of Raymond Carver (1992) and Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other (2024). He is married to Maggie Barrett.

I wanted a picture that didn't say itself right away, that didn't give itself up. But that's always risky, because you work with this fear that in trying to get too much, maybe you're not getting enough.

When I look back at who that kid was in the early 1960s, I was still painting, a kind of hard-edge abstraction. But I was really hooked on an Ashcan-School-like view of real life, of the messiness and complexity of it.

Let me tell you, a picture of dirt can be pretty damned dull. I ask myself, 'Is this insane? Is this another dead end or a way in?' I'm still trying to find out.

[on his generation of photographers] The thought for us was aways: 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 almost a moral dimension.