Do you dream in colour?

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Joel Meyerowitz

Tate Modern

Bankside

London

SE1 9TG

3rd February 2024

"It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice"

Deng Xiaoping

Clearly Deng Xiaoping wasn’t thinking about photographing the cat as he would have realised that it matters critically whether the cat was black or white - at least if he had wanted to get the correct exposure when taking a picture of it catching a mouse. More interestingly, though, he seemed to be unaware of Joel Meyerowitz’s thoughts on the important question of colour in photography.

In 1962, Meyerowitz quit his advertising job in New York to become a photographer as a direct consequence of spending just an hour and a half watching Robert Frank (yes – that one!) take some photographs to illustrate a small brochure that Meyerowitz had designed. In his words “… the things he (Frank) did were so astonishing, as simple as they were, that when I left the location and went out on the street, the world was alive to me in a way I had never experienced.” Luckily for us, that experience provided the inspiration for over half a century of work from one of the true pioneers of street photography.

"Whaddya want--color or black and white?"

The exhibition, in one room of the Natalie Bell Building of Tate Modern, shows mostly a range of Meyerowitz’s colour pictures of the streets and landscapes of America and Europe and explores his innovative use of colour in street photography. However, I was most drawn to the side-by-side comparisons on display that he had made of colour and black and white images at the beginning of his photographic career. In an age long before portable digital cameras were even a twinkle in the eyes of Steven Sasson at Kodak Eastman, these pictures were taken on two separate Leica cameras that Meyerowitz carried with him; one loaded with Kodachrome 35mm colour slide film and the other with 35mm Tri-X black and white film. By comparing pairs of pictures (one from each camera), taken within a short time of each other, that in his words had ”staying power”, Meyerowitz was able to compare the projected colour slide images with the black and white prints, that he had developed and printed himself, to begin to understand the differences between them. He quickly began to appreciate that the black and white images were stronger when their content was graphically powerful such that colour was not critical, but that he much preferred the emotional and spatial depth conveyed by colour.

“What is the art experience about? Really, I’m not interested in making “Art” at all. I never, ever, think about it. To say the word “Art”, it’s almost like a curse on art. I do know that I want to try to get closer to myself. The older I get, the more indications I have about what it is to get closer to yourself. You try less hard. I just want to be.”

Joel Meyerowitz

This concept is explored in depth in his book ‘A Question of Colour’ (which btw, contrary to how it now sounds, won’t be located next to Reni Eddo-Lodge’s more well-known book) where he describes the antipathy shown, at first, to his colour pictures by the fine-art establishment who thought them gaudy and cheap – suitable perhaps only for commercial pictures or ‘snapshots’ taken by amateurs. It is hard to imagine, some 50 years later, how we no longer make that distinction when considering an image and we now readily accept colour photography as an art medium. We have Joel Meyerowitz to thank for much of that progress. That said, a black and white image is still more likely to be tagged as ‘arty’, even if it is relatively poor. In addition, it is now no longer necessary to carry around two cameras as most digital cameras allow quick and easy switches between a huge range of colour and black and white variations and/or such changes can be made easily in post-production with software like Photoshop.

However, that ease should not remove our artistic and deliberate intention prior to pressing the shutter. What is it we are wishing to convey in our image? Meyerowitz would argue that if the content is largely graphic then choose black and white but otherwise colour should perhaps be the first option. He also noted that in a colour picture the background could be as important as the forground – something much less commonplace in black and white images. Further, his argument is that by thinking about whether to choose black and white or colour for any image is to support your ability to see and feel in both ‘languages’ and so have more fun taking photographs! At the heart of this belief lies his central idea that thinking about how you want to make photographs is to think about how you are in the world. You’re now “solving problems photographically and in interesting ways” and not just taking pictures.

“Anything we do with passion, obsession or desire teaches us not only about the medium we’re using but also about ourselves”