Terry Gross: After September 11th my guest Joel
Meyerowitz got special permission to be at Ground Zero documenting
the slow process
of removing the World Trade Center remains. After several weeks
of photographing there, he returned to the project he was supposed
to be working on; photographing Tuscany, whose natural beauty
was the ultimate contrast to the hellish landscape he’s been
immersed in. His book Tuscany: Inside the Lighthas just been published.
The text is by his wife Maggie Barrett. They were married in Tuscany
shortly before September 11th. Meyerowitz was contractually obligated
to go to Tuscany and finish his photography book, nevertheless,
I wondered if he felt almost guilty for leaving behind New York
and Ground Zero.
Joel Meyerowitz: It was wrenching, I have to
say that I would be away in Tuscany and I would be thinking about
what am I missing.
They are still working down there and I had become so much a
part of the rhythm of that place. But I did leave the first time
in
January, at a point when there was a kind of plateau. They had
cleared away most of the surface debris and were beginning to
go below ground level, and there was a sense that they were mining
and I just new that I could leave for that period of time and
it
wouldn’t be so far advanced when I returned that I would
feel I had missed a huge period in the work. And I was right. I
came back and I stepped right into it and it felt, you know, the
familiarity of returning to someplace you know well and suddenly
I was in it again and I didn’t feel I had missed anything
major.
TG: People who go to Italy often come back talking about the
light. What do you have to say about the light in Tuscany and
how it changes
from season to season and from sunshine to rain? What are some
of the qualities you’re working with?
JM: This place is, like every place in the world,
unique to itself but why its unique came to us after a number
of years of observation.
This particular valley, called the Vald’Orcia, which is below
Sienna, is composed of a kind of white clay. Oddly enough it’s
an incredibly nourishing clay. Things grow there phenomenally,
wine, olives, wheat sunflowers, it’s rich land. But its got
a white base to it, it’s not black earth, or rich American
earth, and so when the light rains down in this valley, and because
it’s a valley there’s a particular kind of moisture
always trapped in it. So, the valley itself has a kind of pearlescent
quality its as if the air in the valley is illuminated from within.
Because sunlight striking the ground rises up from the ground it
doesn’t suck up the light because of dark earth so there
is a funny kind of glow around everything and we became aware
of this and it infused the photographs that not only I made but
my
students made. And so it began to suggest itself to us as a very
unique phenomenon in this particular location on the face of
the globe.
TG: How does that glow get affected by changes in the weather and
changes in the season?
JM: Well, in the winter time, the valley is
one of those places that holds the moisture longer than anyplace
else so when you awake
in the morning there is always fog which can be dismal if you’re
living in Norway, but in Tuscany, even in the winter, there is
sunlight, and so it penetrates this fog and then it raises it,
so you have the changing of the day every day. And I felt that
the wintertime was almost the most exciting season of the year.
TG: Joel, one of the books you are well known for is about Cape
Cod and particularly about the light in Cape Cod. How would you
compare Cape Cod light with the light in Tuscany?
JM: Well, oddly they are completely different
but they share some wonderful qualities. Of course Cape Cod is
a spit of sand, also
light colored, surrounded by water so there is always a kind
of atmospheric moisture that rises off the surface of the water,
sort
of cooked by sunlight, and it splinters the light almost prisimatically.
That was my sense of what it was like to be on the Cape, that
there was a kind of purity to the way light fell. When you are
on the
mainland, inland anywhere, there’s always particles of dirt
in the air, whether its pollution or dust, who knows, but those
particles, if you think of a little drop of dust in every molecule
of moisture it reduces the light somewhat, but in Cape Cod there
is no land mass to speak of and so the air seems to be purer, more
glowing. And so there was a kind of radiance, I used to say it
was almost shadowless is how it felt. And so the Cape has its glow
from the waters around it and the Vald’Orcia has its glow
from its substance, what its made of, this clay which is good
enough to be made into pottery so it has a kind of glass-like
reflectance
to it.
TG: There is a certain type of beauty that I
think has almost been, well ruined might be too strong a word,
but there is a certain
type of picture or picture post card that captures this perfect
theme, and we have come to think of it as scenery, or as like,
it’s like a picture post card. And as lovely as it is, its
predictable and clichéd. Do you feel that Joel, as a photographer,
there is a certain type of image that has kind of been ruined
for you by that type of perfect image or perfect scenery? And,
how
do you try to get something that goes deeper than that?
JM: You are absolutely right. The wallpaper
that Tuscany has become is sort of there by the yard. Almost
any photographer can stand
anywhere in Tuscany, in the countryside, and point their camera
and clip off 70 degrees worth with a 35 mm lens and you have
Tuscany. And if you put into it cypress trees on a hilltop with
a church
nearby or charming sheep on the road below you can make something
that everybody has seen in the postcards. So part of the challenge
was to avoid those things that we all know already, that have
ruined the experience for us and try to get into a place where
the surprise,
the freshness, the innocence of observation could make its way.
And so I avoided things like the fields of sunflowers and all
of these lollypop trees. And then one day, towards the end of
our
work, in the Fall actually, we were driving thought a valley
and there were fields of sunflowers. All of them, heads bowed,
brown-stalked,
drooping flowers and it looked like the dead marching off the
battlefield. And I stopped the car and we both gasped and got
out and stood
amongst them. And what I felt was that they had served their
day, they are now going to be turned into useful produce and
they were
a vast horde that was accepting their death, the season had brought
them to this. And I made a photograph, that to me is one of the
darkest and maybe even the most daring pictures in the book because
it is anti-beauty, it is not about the familiar gloss that sunflowers
make its about the reality of the life-cycle. And I think often
for me photography isn’t about making a frame its about
having a moment when I wake up where I think, oh my god, this
is happening
right in front of me, and that kind of awareness, that kind of
mental process is for me where the ideas of photography and the
act of photography combine in a way and perhaps allow us to make
something new.
TG: Photographer Joel Meyerowitz. His new book is called Tuscany: Inside the Light. The text is by Maggie Barrett.
