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I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it's got lots of accounting going on in it-stones and buildings and trees and air - but that's not what fills up a frame. You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.

Joel Meyerowitz

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Joel Meyerowitz
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: March 6
Contributing Editor
Photographer
Writer
The Bronx
New York City
Think
Full
Air
Fill
Thinking
Energy
Empty
Trees
Feelings
Room
Lots
Else
Rooms
Photographer
Accounting
Someone
Building
Photograph
Fills
Enough
Tree
Stones
Buildings
Going
Leave
Discovery
Frame
Something
Risk
Picture
Photographs

More quotes by Joel Meyerowitz

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I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography—that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.
Joel Meyerowitz
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I photographed the entire thing in color because to photograph it in black and white would be to keep it as a tragedy. Because there is a tragic element to photographing, in this case not war, but the collapse. It was just destruction.
Joel Meyerowitz
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Photography is a response that has to do with the momentary recognition of things. Suddenly you're alive. A minute later there was nothing there. I just watched it evaporate. You look one moment and there's everything, next moment it's gone. Photography is very philosophical.
Joel Meyerowitz
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I find it strangely beautiful that the camera with its inherent clarity of object and detail can produce images that in spite of themselves offer possibilities to be more than they are a photograph of nothing very important at all, nothing but an intuition, a response, a twitch from the photographer’s experience.
Joel Meyerowitz
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You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.
Joel Meyerowitz
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Making any statement of your feelings is risky. It's just like making pictures.
Joel Meyerowitz
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Photography is about being exquisitely present.
Joel Meyerowitz
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One of the things I learned on the street was to trust life and to keep hands off of it, and that feeling continues in the rest of the works that I do, the portrait, the landscapes, or any interest that I have. Things are good enough as they are, there's no reason to tamper with them.
Joel Meyerowitz
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The thought for us [street photographers] was always: How much could we absorb and embrace of a moment of existence that would disappear in an instant? And, Could we really make it live as art? There was an almost moral dimension.
Joel Meyerowitz
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'Tough' meant it was an uncompromising image, something that came from your gut, out of instinct, raw, of the moment, something that couldn't be described in any other way. So it was tough. Tough to like, tough to see, tough to make, tough to understand. The tougher they were the more beautiful they became.
Joel Meyerowitz
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It comes down to risk, again and again. If you risk coming out, if you risk making pictures that aren’t good, you might discover something in a photograph that is the key. The very doorway to your own interest.
Joel Meyerowitz
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I have to say, taking photographs is such an instantaneous act. The recognition and the acting on the recognition, depending on your equipment, is close to instantaneous.
Joel Meyerowitz
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Attempts by some teachers to adjust school curricula to incorporate programs that children watch on television suggest a new means of 'leading' children by running after them as quickly as possible.
Joel Meyerowitz
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A lot of what I am looking for is a moment of astonishment, he says. Those moments of pure consciousness when you involuntarily inhale and say 'Wow!'
Joel Meyerowitz