There’s nothing quiet about this photograph, is there? It’s busy, noisy, so full of colour and life. It’s shouting at you. What a glorious noise it makes.
Photographer Joel Meyerowitz once described this image as his attempt to capture “the all of it”. And he comes very close here.
Meyerowitz is one of the great street photographers. He had the good fortune, of course, to have New York in all its messy majesty as his subject.
“If you immerse yourself in street life,” the photographer writes in his new book Joel Meyerowitz: How I Make Photographs, “sooner or later you’re likely to see something that calls out to you.”
Every face in this photograph promises a story. The old man smoking a cigar, the girl looking at the camera, the guy in white in the middle distance. Who is he? What was his life experience?
Some day someone will be inspired to write a novel based on this photograph. They will call it The All of It and it will be an epic.
Joel Meyerowitz: How I Make Photographs by Joel Meyerowitz, published by Laurence King is out now, www.laurenceking.com © Joel Meyerowitz
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