Joel Meyerowitz, 'Une rétrospective'

The spiritual lovechild of Robert Frank and Eugène Atget, Joel Meyerowitz became known as one of the giants of street photography during the ’60s and ’70s. A friend of Garry Winogrand, Tony Ray-Jones, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus, he focused on urban life and everyday scenes on the pavements of New York and Paris, always on the lookout for a ‘decisive moment’. Creating a sort of enchanted reality, he depicted the lives of cities in colour, in an era where black and white was still considered the only real ‘serious’ and ‘artistic’ photographic form. From traffic jams of R16s and 2CVs on the Parisian Grands Boulevards (1967) to the commotion of 9/11, a whole astonishing career is on show at the MEP.