Joel Meyerowitz: Between the City and the Sea
Overview
Jackson Fine Art is proud to exhibit Between the City and the Sea,a selection of work from Meyerowitz’s seminal Cape Light series, his first major artistic endeavor after his pivotal transition to large-format color photography. It is befitting that Meyerowitz would choose the small charming towns of Cape Cod to first explore the ephemeral and complex nature of color—painter Edward Hopper traveled to the area for more than thirty years, enticed by the possibilities for his palette. For Meyerowitz, the presence of color makes the visual experience more personal and nuanced. The provincial scenes in these photographs—the swinging clothesline or the lifeguard’s post—are happenstance. What’s of real value to Meyerowitz is the site’s interaction with its environment at that particular moment. In this beautiful series, it’s not the parts that make the photograph, but also the color spectrum within it.
Meyerowitz has also used his talents to document large-scale transition, recording the progression from one state of being to another. In 1988, he was commissioned by IBM to photograph the Atlantic Tower in midtown Atlanta, built for the company a year earlier. Meyerowitz realized the new skyscraper marked the beginning of a significant transformation of the area and photographed the changing landscape from various vantage points around the tower. A small selection of this project will also be on display at the gallery.