La questione del colore

“What do you want: color or black and white?” It was this question that Joel Meyerowitz found himself having to answer the first time he picked up a camera.

In this book, Meyerowitz tells the story of his early days as a photographer, when he was told that serious artists took black-and-white pictures. “But why,” he wondered, “since the world is in color?” An advocate of color photography, Joel Meyerowitz has influenced generations of artists, documenting the changing social landscape of the United States for fifty-eight years.

For a time in the late 1960s, Meyerowitz carried two cameras with him: one to shoot in black and white, the other in color. How, when and why U.S. photographers moved from producing black-and-white images, valued within the gallery and exhibition system, to color photography, once considered the preserve of vacation photographers, is still the subject of much debate today.

JOEL MEYEROWITZ – Born in New York in 1938, he is an award-winning photographer whose work has been shown in more than 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. Renowned as a pioneer of color photography, he has published 53 books and is represented by the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, the Polka Galerie in Paris and the Huxley-Parlour Gallery in London. He lives and works in London and New York.

ROBERT SHORE – He is a journalist, author and playwright. He is editor of “Elephant Magazine,” a quarterly magazine of contemporary art and visual culture.