Exhibition
Joel Meyerowitz: Between the Dog and the Wolf
20 Jul 2022 – 13 Aug 2022
Regular hours
- Monday
- 10:00 – 17:30
- Tuesday
- 10:00 – 17:30
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 17:30
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 17:30
- Friday
- 10:00 – 17:30
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 17:30
- Sunday
- Closed
Free admission
Address
- 3-5 Swallow Street
- London
England - W1B 4DE
- United Kingdom
This July, Huxley-Parlour is pleased to present thirteen large-scale photographs by American photographer, Joel Meyerowitz.
About
Taking his acclaimed photoseries - Between The Dog and the Wolf - as a point of departure, the exhibition radically extends his historic body of work with the addition of photographs from contempraneous series. All the works are shot on the same large format camera, and causally linked by their unique exploration of colour and evening summer light. Spanning two decades, Joel Meyerowitz’ pictures bespeak his position as a pioneer of modern, colour photography.
Originally published as a photobook, Between the Dog and the Wolf captures serene swimming pools girdled by expansive seas and endless, twilight horizons in Cape Cod throughout the 70s and 80s. The contrast between pools and the ocean is not only an aesthetic one, but a philosophical contrast too: the title comes from the French phrase ‘entre chien et loup’, alluding to oncoming twilight. Meyerowitz notes, “It seemed to me that the French liken the twilight to the notion of the tame and the savage, the known and the unknown, where that special moment of the fading of the light offers us an entrance into the place where our senses might fail us slightly, making us vulnerable to the vagaries of our imagination.”
Meyerowitz is widely acknowledged to be one of the first photographers - amongst others such as William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Ernst Haas - to bring colour photography from the periphery to the centre of Fine Art photography. Historically, where black and white photography was understood to be a serious medium, colour was widely considered to be technically inferior and aesthetically limiting - occupying the realm of advertising campaigns, television, and personal holiday photographs. In defiance of this, Meyerowitz’ work demonstrated how the medium allowed nuanced contemplation of form, composition, and mood. The works in Between the Dog and the Wolf were shot on a large format, Deardorff camera, the sheer weight and size of which necessitates slow and immersive long exposure photographs, revealing the full range of colour in the landscape.
In this exhibition, the addition of works from Cape Light and Wild Flowers emphasise Meyerowitz’ command of colour to cast a cerebral, magical sheen on otherwise mundane, distinctly American scenery. Largely unpeopled, the photographs in the exhibition shore permanence and impermanence, the man made and the sublime, against one another. This exhibition also builds fruitfully on Huxley-Parlour’s two previous exhibitions with Meyerowitz: Cape Light, (2016) and Towards Colour, (2017). By continuing to present his colour photography at its most potent, Between the Dog and the Wolf notes the enduring importance of contemplative and considered image- making in an era of increasingly accessible and omnipresent photography.
Joel Meyerowitz was born in 1938 in New York. He studied art and medical illustration at Ohio State University, and went on to work in advertising in the early 1960s. After a chance encounter with photographer Robert Frank, he went on to establish himself as an eminent street photographer, in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank.
Meyerowitz’ exhibition history is extensive and broad, having appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries internationally over a span of fifty years. Major solo exhibitions include: the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago. Meyerowitz has published twenty eight publications, including Cape Light (1978), St. Louis and the Arch (1980), Wild Flowers (1983), Redheads (1990), Bay/Sky (1993), and The Water’s Edge (1996), and a two volume retrospective publication, Taking My Time (2013). Cape Light is widely considered to be one of the most important photobooks of the late twentieth century. He is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities awards and a two-time Guggenheim Fellow. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Meyerowitz lives and works between New York and Italy.