New York City, 1963 © Joel Meyerowitz/Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery
New York City, 1963 © Joel Meyerowitz/Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery 
TITLE_NAME :
Joel Meyerowitz . Why Color?

09/12/2017 - 11/03/2018

C/O Berlin 
Amerika Haus . Hardenbergstraße 22–24 
 
10623 Berlin

www.co-berlin.org   

 
Fifth Avenue, skyscrapers, beauty salons, billboards and diners. A group of four young women stand outside a store. Their clothes are brilliantly colored, their pumps white, their backcombed hair immaculate. What would this charming picture, so rich in nuances, be without color? The New York photographer manages to fish surprising and sometimes peculiar fleeting moments from the stream of everyday happenings. His precise use of color enables him to bring their very individual vividness and pictorial intensity to the fore. 

Starting in 1962, Joel Meyerowitz began experimenting with using color photography first and added black-and-white photography to his work just shortly afterwards. In 1966 he drove across the whole of Europe, and he used color photography’s special qualities when the subject required color shades and luminosity for being connected. He nevertheless made deliberate use of black and white in order to highlight contrasts between elements of the image, be they artistic or graphic. Within a few years after his return, he began working exclusively in color, which was a break with the staunchly remaining black-and-white dictum of artistic photography and photojournalism. From the mid-1970s onward, he created precisely composed studies in light on Cape Cod on the East Coast, which are today regarded as icons of contemporary photography. As one of the most influential pioneers of New Color Photography, Joel Meyerowitz (*1938) has also left a visible impact on many younger generations. Curated by Felix Hoffmann, C/O Berlin presents the first and only German exhibition of Meyerowitz’s work, which is focused on the vintage color and black-and white prints from the 1960s to the present day, placing them in relation to each other.