Hi pals! ✌️ In this post, I’ll recap a recent trip to New York, and how a small exhibition of some of Joel Meyerowitz’s work played a well-timed part in the ongoing exertion of this counter-intuitive obsession I have with making work in a city so far from home.
Letting Go of the Hooks
The Tate Modern is currently hosting an ongoing exhibition of Joel Meyerowitz photographs to accompany the release of ‘A Question of Color’, an amazing collection of early color photography paired with nearly identical scenes that were captured in the more traditional fine-art black and white format.
None of that is what I actually want to talk about here, despite it being an amazing body of work. No, there’s a quote near the back of the book that basically broke me when I read it in early January, and I want to explore why.
“When I was trying to give up the incident on the street, the moment that is the hook - lovers kissing, two businessmen saying goodbye with their pals-ey bullshit, an unexpected gesture or something like that - I started instead to try to frame pictures of deep space and complicated human connections that really were not about anything, but that had enough density and dimensions to make themselves interesting to me. … Could I make pictures like that in the present time, pictures showing the life of the city without depending on some fun incident? Could I do that? Would it be interesting enough?
These later images that Joel describes in that quote are some of my favourite from the book, or like the example above, join my personal pantheon of ‘genuinely stupid good’ photographs that keep the addiction to street work alive.
I think what was so impactful to me is how universal the experience of trying to capture ‘the moment’ is to any street photographer, and what a deeply draining experience it can be. Daniel Arnold talks about it in the recent Paulie B ‘Walkie Talkie’ episode, where he shares how depressing it can be to not get anything ‘good’ for an extended period of time. I loved how he talked about digital photography being a relationship with success, whereas film photography is a relationship with failure. Yeah overall in life, you miss 99% of the shots you don’t take - but with film photography, you also miss 60% of the shots you do take.
New York is that place for me where I have failed far, far more than I’ve succeeded. From early trips in my 20’s where essentially entire rolls are underexposed and unusable, to more recent trips in my 30’s where I was too shy, or too cold, or too tired to really try. With just two or so weeks before a fresh New York journey, reading about Joel’s deliberate letting go of the constant pressure to nab the perfect ‘hook’, and to just capture the world in all it’s multi-dimensional texture was the perfect push to try something new.
Isn’t that kind of the everyday social pressure du jour? To constantly be reminded that our lives should be a series of never ending amazing moments, shared with and admired not just by those closest to us, but by an audience of our own creation? What happens when that’s relinquished, and we sit within the beautiful density of our surroundings, taking stock of the complexity of it all - interesting or not?
Here are two images that maybe illustrate how I approached this practice of letting go. I say maybe. You’ll probably be a better judge of if this gets my point across at all, I’m pretty deep into this line of thinking here and I’ve lost my little breadcrumb trail back to sanity.
This is a fun little hook. They’re great - do you think they gave this any thought before they met up for the day? Maybe it speaks to their personalities a bit; like the gal on the left is a bit quick to pounce on weaknesses, and the gal on the right just tries to blend in around others. As an image; fine. They’re the clear subjects here. Nothing is really going on outside of their sphere, and the rest of the frame is incidental to reading the picture. You could replace a sizeable chunk of this with blank white space and it would essentially say the exact same thing. By contrast, consider the following:
To me, there is no subject here, and you couldn’t lose a lot without drastically changing what it evokes, and how. The universe is the hook, and it’s permeating the nothingness in each dark corner here. I look back on this one with pure wonder. Hearing that rhythmic wet roll of car tires on a slick street, the brutal hum of neon. How hungry I was for a chicken wrap. ‘Would it be interesting enough?’. I’m satisfied that it can be.
Okay. Does It Make Any Difference At All
Yeah, no, probably not. At least in the short term, for my own work. This current moment of street photography is mostly about the absurd, or ‘the impossible world’ as Daniel Arnold puts it. My personal style is not so much about that, but I can’t deny that every time I go out, I do want to find that ‘perfect’ moment. That kind of lucky catch where the stadium erupts in a collective outburst of ethereal joy, except it’s just all your photographer buds on insta and they comment ‘🔥🔥🔥’ and repost it to their stories.
But those catches are so few and far between that it is a borderline illness to expect a grand impossible moment on each outing. Even if they did happen, would you be ready? I was directly in front of a cab that was stopped at the intersection of a busy street, and just as I took an opportunity to walk across the street, the cabbie stuck a proud middle finger out of the window for the driver behind who was laying on their horn. The whole thing was perfect - and I was 3 seconds too impatient to catch it. I spent the rest of the day upset with myself, ready to just completely accept that this whole photography thing was not for me. I tried, I couldn’t cut it, pack it in. That was it - that was the perfect picture, and I missed it.
Maybe we have to fall somewhere in between. A middle ground between constant failure and contemplative wonder. My old buddy Bob Ross used to say you can’t paint the light without the dark, and it remains true. As in photography, as in life - we have to fail, sometimes at what we love, to discover the beauty of where we find ourselves. (Incidentally, this also feels like what I would write in my letterboxd review of ‘Past Lives’, were I to have an account - if you have one, feel free to steal this passage).
Ultimately, Joel Meyerowitz was at a point in his photography career where a decided adjustment to his working style was necessary to further explore the deep connection he was fostering with art as a whole. He’d go on to produce some of the finest social documentary work of the mid 20th century. I’m having a bit of fun while I continue to attempt to start my career. Within that context, this past New York trip was a real success - I practiced a couple different approaches, and felt really confident and excited while I did it. The results are almost peripheral. Practicing seeing was the long-term play.
Editor’s Note: I’m still selling some zines! zine.mackiec.xyz - I want to make some more this year. It’s so rewarding to see people interacting with physical work.