Joel Meyerowitz has the patience of a skilled hunter. It
accounts for the authority of his photographs. Is there one
of his prints that does not express his ongoing quest for
the instant when nature can reveal itself through mood, light,
mist, seaweed, wind, or the endless vortices of water in
its dialogue with sand? To his lens, the hours of the day
are a changing of the guard, and the declarations of afternoon
are an era removed from the discoveries of morning; high
tide and low tide speak across the gulf of their separated
existence. Meyerowitz's relation to nature is as private
as the conception we can hold of a great beauty who is ready
to reveal her nude secrets to but one photographer, her own
private court photographer. So he treads with the lightest
touch and the most exquisite sense of the moment into those
turns of the atmosphere that inform us of the wayward and
not always unsinister whims that breathe in colloquies between
cloud and sky, as if it is in the flux itself, and nowhere
else, that we can find our few absolute statements of existence.
No art is more obdurate at resisting the development of profound
seriousness in its artists than photography. Meyerowitz leaves
us with the uneasy sensation that he has traversed the impasse—that
we can speak of him therefore with all the lack of ease that
constricts one's voice as it declares a photographer to be
a great artist; yet a study of his photographs insists on
the word, and the resonance of his prints warms one's
hesitations—he is, yes, profoundly serious and a great photographer.
