Some photographers are defined by a single look, a visual language that is evoked at the sound of their name. For Ansel Adams, it was his vertiginous black and white mountainscapes; for Richard Avedon, it was minimal and clinical portraits. Joel Meyerowitz, on the other hand, never bound himself to any one style. Look through his six decades of photographs and one sees chaotic street photography in New York and Paris, large-format landscapes in Cape Cod and Tuscany, delicate portraits and graceful still lifes—some in color, some monochrome. His career has been one of constant reinvention and constant acclaim. When it was announced last year that Meyerowitz would be this year’s recipient of the Sony Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award, no one could have been too surprised.
A selection of Meyerowitz’s photographs is now on view at Somerset House in London. Past recipients include Mary Ellen Mark, Martin Parr and Sebastião Salgado—all of whom could be identified by looking at any one of their images. Meyerowitz, however, is not so easy to categorize. When I spoke to him next to a sunlit window in Somerset House, I asked him whether his brain works differently depending on what he’s shooting—and what he’s shooting with. “What’s so great about the diversity of the subject matter,” he answered in his soft-spoken New York drawl, “is that it’s a question, a true question emerging from the medium itself. What is a portrait? What is a still life? Do you do it like the Dutch did it in the 1600s? Or do you find a form that feels perfect for today, for the materials you use, for the subject you’re choosing? The way of making it raises issues.”
The range of images on display in this exhibition is disappointingly narrow; rather than a lifetime retrospective, the exhibition concentrates on the images Meyerowitz took over a summer traveling around Europe between 1966 and 1967. (To get a hint of the breadth of his career, viewers have to be content with the three videos that accompany the exhibition.) The show does not reflect a lifetime of work, as Salgado’s did a few years ago when he was the recipient of the same prize. Still, the European images mark an important transitionary period for Meyerowitz. “It was a coming of age experience,” he says of his time travelling around Europe. “I grew up in that year. I developed a kind of core understanding of my spirit, my curiosity, my leanings.”
The Europa images show a young man training his eye and enjoying himself meandering around the continent. There are family get-togethers in sunny Málaga and stormy clouds in Trafalgar Square. A couple speed past on a motorcycle in Corfu, looking the definition of cool. “It was my first opportunity to be on my own in a foreign place,” he says of the trip. “Seeing what was in the world, that interested me! All that energy coming to me, it helped shape my identity.”
On returning to New York, Meyerowitz displayed some of the European work in a one-man show at MoMA, 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 that’s possible today, with photography being such a vast public exploration. Everybody has a camera. Back then, nobody had cameras.”
I wondered, as I often do when talking to photographers, how he feels about the future of the medium. Does he worry about the proliferation of smartphones and the immediacy of social media? No, as it turns out. “I’m optimistic,” he told me with a smile. “There are billions of people in the world today that have a smartphone with a camera in it, which means they’re educating themselves visually. Even if it’s a picture of their cat or a plate of food, they’re beginning to look. And that kind of looking en masse is going to produce a new generation of people who are thinking visually, photographically, making images. And that wasn’t the way when I was beginning. It was rare. I mean, art was art. Photography was in the basement.”
That’s not just a metaphor. When Meyerowitz first started taking pictures in the early sixties, he claims there was only one photo gallery in New York, in the basement of a Chinese laundry on East 10th Street. “It was an impoverished time,” Meyerowitz recalls. “My generation felt there was no hope. We couldn’t guarantee ourselves a way to make a living or to get 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 appropriate for “serious” photographers. For advertising and family snapshots, fine, but art? That 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 reverence as monochrome. He still shot in black and white, however. During his European sojourn, 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 has been a means of exploration, rather than the strict follow-through to a preconceived artistic idea.
It’s no surprise then that Meyerowitz uses the medium to explore different sides to himself. “What I’ve appreciated most about photography is the variety of questions and range of answers that you can come up with. Each one of them draws on a different quality of your own persona,” he says. “You are a new version of yourself. When you’re making a portrait of somebody, when you’re actually standing there and confronting that person, you’re exchanging all kinds of unspoken messages.”
Many of Meyerowitz’s images don’t contain people. The seascapes of Cape Cod, for instance, or his more recent foray into still lifes. But many of his most beguiling images are the ones where a face looks back at us. His street photography works best when it captures personalities among urban chaos, but his portraits—whether of redheads at the beach or workers at Ground Zero after 9/11—are striking for the feeling of kinship they evoke. “When you get up really close to a stranger, and you enter an intimate distance with a camera,” he says, “there’s an electrical charge between the subject and the photographer. If you choose to feel that.”
I was moved to ask him whether he felt love for the people he photographed. “Yes, there were times when really being this close to somebody”—he indicated the small space between us—”and watching the flicker of their humanity in their reaction to me, we could feel that kind of magnetic force between human beings. And something like love comes up. It’s a fragile thing, but it really can exist for a split second.” I asked him if, before our time was up, I could take his photograph. “Sure.”
Meyerowitz now lives in London. He still takes to the street and photographs. “You see things because you have the camera. If you don’t carry a camera, then 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.”
That’s probably why his career has been so creatively varied: when you treat art as play, you’re bound to discover ways of seeing. You can experiment, fail, push yourself in new directions. At 88, Meyerowitz is still playing games and still making pictures. “And I figure that, at my age, I can do whatever the fuck I want to do right now.”
The “Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition 2026” is at Somerset House through May 4, 2026.
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