Some photographers are defined by a single look, a visual language conjured upon hearing their name. For Ansel Adams, it was his black-and-white mountain views; For Richard Avedon, these were simple, clinical images. Joel Meyerowitz, on the other hand, has never tied himself to any one style. Look through six decades of his photographs, and one will see chaotic street photographs in New York and Paris, large-scale landscapes of Cape Cod and Tuscany, delicate portraits and beautiful still lifes—some in color, some in monochrome. His career has been full of constant renewal and constant acclaim. When it was announced last year that Meyerowitz would receive this year’s Sony Award for Outstanding Contribution to Photography, no one was surprised.
A selection of Meyerowitz’s photographs is now on display at Somerset House in London. Past winners include Mary Ellen Mark, Martin Parr and Sebastiao Salgado – all of whom can be recognized by looking at any of their photos. However, Meyerowitz is not easy to classify. When I spoke to him next to a sunlit window at Somerset House, I asked him whether his brain worked differently depending on what he was shooting, and what he was shooting with. “What’s great about the diversity of subject matter,” he answered in his soft New York accent, “is that it’s a question, a real question that emerges from the medium itself. What is a portrait? What is a still life? Do you do it as the Dutch did it in the 17th century? Or do you find a form that seems perfect for today, for the materials you use, for the subject you choose? The way you make it raises issues.”
The range of images presented in this exhibition is disappointingly narrow; Rather than focusing on a lifetime retrospective, the exhibition focuses on photographs taken by Meyerowitz during a summer trip around Europe between 1966 and 1967. (To get a glimpse of the breadth of his career, viewers will have to be content with the three videos that accompany the exhibition.) The exhibition does not reflect a lifetime of work, as Salgado did a few years ago when he received the same award. However, the European Pictures represent an important transitional period for Meyerowitz. “It was a coming-of-age experience,” he says of his time traveling around Europe. “I grew up that year. I developed a kind of basic understanding of my spirit, my curiosity, my inclinations.”
Pictures of Europe show a young man training his eye and enjoying wandering around the continent. There are family reunions in sunny Malaga and storm clouds in Trafalgar Square. A couple speeding by on a motorbike in Corfu, looking for a great introduction. “It was my first opportunity to be alone in a foreign place,” he says of the trip. “Seeing what was out there in the world, it interested me! All that energy coming at me, helped shape my identity.”
Upon his return to New York, Meyerowitz showed some European works in a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, just three years after he first picked up a camera. “I was like, how did that happen?” He says looking back. “I don’t know if this would be possible today, when photography has become such a large-scale public exploration. Everyone has a camera. At that time, no one had cameras.”
I wondered, as I often do when I talk to photographers, how he felt about the future of the medium. Does he worry about the spread of smartphones and the immediacy of social media? No, as it turns out. “I’m optimistic,” he told me, smiling. “There are billions of people in the world today who have a smartphone with a camera, which means they are visually educating themselves. Even if it’s a picture of their cat or a plate of food, they start looking. And that kind of looking collectively will produce a new generation of people who think visually, photographically, and make images. And that wasn’t the way it was when I started. It was rare. I mean, art was art. Photography was in the basement.”
This is not just a metaphor. When Meyerowitz first started taking photographs in the early 1960s, he claimed there was only one photo gallery in New York, in the basement of a Chinese laundry on East 10th Street. “It was a poor time,” Meyerowitz recalls. “My generation felt there was no hope. We couldn’t guarantee ourselves a way to make a living or gain recognition. We just had to do the work for the love of doing it.”
When Meyerowitz first picked up a camera, color photography was not considered suitable for “serious” photographers. For ads and family shots, that’s fine, but art? It had to be black and white. Meyerowitz was among the first American photographers—along with Stephen Shore and William Eggleston—to treat color photography with the same appreciation as monochrome photography. However, he still shoots in black and white. During his stay in Europe, Meyerowitz took two cameras, one loaded with color film, the other with black and white, and for a while photographed the same subjects with both in order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the two looks. From the beginning, photography was a means of exploration, not the strict pursuit of a preconceived artistic idea.
It’s no surprise, then, that Meyerowitz uses the medium to explore different sides of himself. “What I appreciate most about photography is the variety of questions and the range of answers you can come up with,” he says. “Each one is based on a different quality of your personality.” “You’re a new version of yourself. When you’re painting a picture of someone, when you’re actually standing there and facing that person, you’re exchanging all kinds of unspoken messages.”
Many of Meyerowitz’s pictures do not contain people. Cape Cod seascapes, for example, or his recent foray into still life. But many of his most beguiling images are those in which the face looks back at us. His street photography works best when it captures figures amid urban chaos, but his images—whether of redheads on the beach or workers at Ground Zero after September 11—are striking because of the feeling of kinship they evoke. “When you get really close to a stranger, and you enter an intimate space with the camera, there’s an electric charge between the subject and the photographer. If you choose to feel that,” he says.
I was moved when I asked him if he felt love for the people he photographed. “Yes, there have been times when we are very close to someone” – he pointed to the small distance between us – “and when we see the glimmer of their humanity in their reaction to me, we can feel this kind of magnetic force between people. And something like love appears. It is a fragile thing, but it can really exist for a split second.” I asked him if I could take a picture of him before the allotted time was up. “certainly.”
Meyerowitz now lives in London. He still goes out into the street and takes pictures. “You see things because you have a camera. If you don’t carry a camera, you’re just going about your business. You’re shopping or doing whatever you’re doing. But when you have a camera, it’s a license to see. It’s a game.”
Perhaps this is why his career has been so creatively diverse: when you approach art as a play, you are bound to discover ways of seeing. You can experiment, fail, and push yourself in new directions. At 88, Meyerowitz still plays games and takes photos. “And I think at my age, I can do what I want to do now.”
the “Sony World Photography Awards 2026 exhibition‘On display at Somerset House until 4 May 2026.
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