Huxley-Parlour is delighted to announce Select works, 1962-2019, an exhibition of photographs by world-renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz. Marking the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, twenty-seven works are brought together which span the breadth of Meyerowitz’ six decade long career, examining the artist’s changing approach to photography and the shifts in his photographic voice.

Meyerowitz’ photographs from the 1960s depicted the freneticism and the inertia of New York’s streets. Visual matter is often multi-layered within the photographer’s vision - the boy backlit by a ray of sunlight is a visual precursor to the translucent wedding dress in a shop window, the life-size doll riding pillion on a motorcycle and the suited man lingering by a parked Cadillac. The photographer’s alertness to phenomena, particularly those which he describes as ‘nearly invisible’, generates both a wit and a sensitivity to the world as it reveals itself to him. What Meyerowitz searched for in his explorations of the street were fleeting moments of harmony within the chaos, the same moments of unlikely clarity revealed in the music of Meyerowitz’ New York contemporaries Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, and Miles Davis.

There’s an instantaneity to these early photographs, attested to by slanting horizons and the candour of the people depicted. However, in his photobook Cape light, published 1978, Meyerowitz moved away from the energy and velocity of New York and his 35mm camera. He instead adopted a slower approach – with an 8x10 inch view camera he turned his lens towards swathes of undisturbed horizon and quiet domestic interiors, making colour and form his subjects. The exhibited photographs from this period are characterised by their meditative qualities, their subtlety, and their meticulously constructed compositions. For example, the photographer explored the interplay between colour and wind in hanging laundry and how that interaction might be translated into a photograph. Evening light playing over still waters forms a recurring motif – the jazz of the street has subsided here, replaced by something more symphonic.

Although subsequent projects by the artist alter their tone, they often retain this tranquility. But while much separates the various tones of Meyerowitz’ photographic voice, his sensitivity to the appearance of the world remains. Curiosity and wonder over the peculiarities of vision and the world itself cause the photographer to find in the near invisibility of habitual perception a strain of sublimity, and something that surprises him. Meyerowitz draws from the poet Robert Frost, particularly his 1939 essay The figure of a poem, in which the poet writes ‘No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.’