Meyerowitz - Out of the Ordinary 1970–1980

The international travelling exhibition by the award-winning American ‘street photographer’ Joel Meyerowitz, Out of the Ordinary 1970-1980, comprises 117 colour photographs, including many vintage prints as well as modern prints. Meyerowitz is a ‘street photographer’ in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, although he works exclusively in colour.

In part thanks to Meyerowitz, colour photography -which before that time was regarded as ‘commercial‘ and uninteresting for artists- became an accepted medium. He can be classed among the ‘classics’ of modern photographic history, along with William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. In the 1960s Meyerowitz was a pioneer in the field of colour photography. 

 

 

In 1974 he gave up black & white entirely and added a large format view camera to his 35 mm. work. He was no longer interested in recording only the event, or incident, in the centre of the frame, but in trying to see everything in the space, near to far, and thus tried to make the entire ‘field’ of the photograph ‘interesting’, rather than depending on the event to be what the photograph was about. The result of his quest was a sensitive, meditative form of photography that slowly found a world-wide following. The exhibition Out of the Ordinary 1970-1980 shows this quest.