The Pleasure of Seeing: Conversations on Joel Meyerowitz's sixty years in the life of photography

Joel Meyerowitz (born March 6, 1938) is a street photographer and portrait and landscape photographer. He began photographing in color in 1962 and was an early advocate of the use of color during a time when there was significant resistance to the idea of color photography as serious art. In 1962, inspired by seeing Robert Frank at work, Meyerowitz quit his job as an art director at an advertising agency and took to the streets of New York City with a 35mm camera and Colors film. Garry Winogrand, Tony Ray-Jones, Lee Friedlander, Tod Papageorge, and Diane Arbus were photographing there at the same time. The fleeting moments of street life in New York City and other American cities that Meyerowitz has captured are some of the earliest and best-known examples of color street photography. Many of his photographs are icons of modern photography, and made Meyerowitz, along with William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, one of the most influential modern photographers and representatives of the “New Color Photography” of the 1960s and 70s.

Lorenzo Braca (born 1977) is an Italian historian and photographer who has published widely on the literature, the mentality, and the imagination of the late Middle Ages. He is currently working for the Catholic University of Milan on research projects concerning Medieval intellectual history. As a photographer, his work is oriented primarily towards the urban environment, its evolution, and the overlooked signs of human presence. Braca’s photographs have been exhibited in collective shows since 2016, and in 2021 he had his first solo exhibition. He is now about to publish a book co-written with American photographer Joel Meyerowitz on his sixty-year career.