Word: meyerowitz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...beautiful woman in a black bikini, lying on her back, horizontal, on bare sand, the straps released from her shoulders, and her face and thighs cropped by the frame, would not have looked out of place in Vogue. A bright flat tint of glamor clings to too many of Meyerowitz's pictures, a glamor that, in the commissioned St. Louis work, can verge on meretriciousness...
...produce work of the purity and absoluteness one sees in much of the innocent, incunabular sort of photography of the mid-19th century, in the Civil War photographs of Matthew Brady and his colleagues, or in Eugene Atget's pictures of Paris streets at the turn of the century. Meyerowitz's work, which ranked on the "windows" side of the New York show, has a kind of emphatic resplendence that the best early photographers, soberly concerned with the hard documentary fact, would never allow...
...difference is willful. Canaday's complaint, which is over 100 years old, can scarcely concern Meyerowitz. The Cape Cod photographs were motivated by an essentially romantic, lyrical, personal desire not merely to record experience but to describe it. In photographing an object or event, he is loyal primarily to his feelings, to his refined and vivid emotional impression of whatever his eye lands on; and, to somewhat warp and make literal a phrase of Wordsworth's, he throws over the photographed thing "a certain coloring of imagination." The hot oranges, yellow and pinks of pillows filling a couch struck...
...remains to be said (or rather, seen) in Meyerowitz's Cape Cod pictures, that despite innumerable glories and pleasures, pain, suffering and psychological ambiguity are persistently present in the world, even in Provincetown; that to live in a salubrious vacuum like Cape Cod is something of a luxury and a privilege, with all the possible, complacent delusions attendant to luxury and privilege at full work; that most women are not bathing beauties, and that this fact is not necessarily a misfortune; that to see, in Wordsworth's phrase, into the life of things, requires a particular kind of mental firmness...
...suspect what the matter comes down to depends upon whether one is willing to allow photographers as wide and loose a license as we give certain writers and painters, or whether, as is the case with me, one's pleasure from photographs such as Meyerowitz's is scratched by what may be an impertinent moral prickling. But one should finally trust and retrieve from this argument the photographs themselves: the best of them -- two pictures of clothes-lines, a glass-topped table, a couple of porches, and one, in the Harcus Krakow gallery, which is merely a bare clean plane...