Taking My Time

Somewhere between the snapshot grabbed in a quarter of a second and the 8x10 negative that takes a full minute to compose, Joel Meyerowitz worked out what kind of photographer he wanted to be. Taking My Time is the two-volume account of that half-century of deciding, and its title is also its argument. Speed made his reputation on the streets of 1960s New York. Slowness made his masterpieces on Cape Cod. He spent fifty years learning to hold both in a single career.

He started in 1962 after watching Robert Frank move around a shoot, and the conversion was instant, physical, total. Within a few years he was one of the photographers dragging color into serious street work, back when color still read as vulgar to the gatekeepers of the medium. The early frames catch New York as a field of simultaneous accidents: a woman mid-stride, a car door swinging, a shaft of light knifing between buildings, a stranger's glance snagging the lens.

The debt to Frank is everywhere in that early work, and fully metabolized. Where Frank was cold and diagnostic, Meyerowitz brought warmth and color and a native's affection for the crowd, so the pictures feel less like an indictment of America than an embrace of a single overstuffed street. He took the older man's freedom and pointed it at joy.

Then he picked up the 8x10 and slowed to the pace of the tide. Cape Light, the work that came out of Provincetown in the late 1970s, is all patience and porch glow, color so tender it feels remembered more than seen. The camera that forced him under a dark cloth and made him wait for the sky to turn taught a discipline his younger, faster self could never have sat still for.

Look at the Cape Light frame of a screen porch at dusk, the interior lamp just winning against the blue outside. Nothing happens in it, and that is the achievement, a photograph that holds an entire evening's mood in the balance of two light sources. It is the opposite of the decisive moment, and just as hard to get.

The shift is the most valuable thing here for anyone who makes pictures for a living. Most photographers find one speed and defend it for a career. He kept both instruments in the case and chose between them by feel, matching the tempo of the camera to the tempo of the subject, and the survey lets you watch that judgment mature frame by frame.

One volume lingers on his year photographing the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, a commission most photographers would have knocked out in a weekend. He treated it as a meditation, returning in every light until the monument stopped being a landmark and became an instrument for measuring weather and distance. The patience Cape Cod taught him turned a civic assignment into art.

The reach keeps widening. His portraits, his still lifes, the Aftermath project that made him the only photographer with continuous access to Ground Zero in the months after the towers fell: it should feel scattered and somehow does not. That access produced the fullest record of the recovery from inside the pile, worked with the same patient large-format eye he brought to a quiet beach. He narrates all of it himself, generously, in a voice that treats his own triumphs and dead ends with the same curiosity.

He is also one of the few great practitioners who could explain the tradition he worked in. The history of street photography he co-wrote reads like a working shooter's argument rather than an academic's, and the same clarity runs through his commentary here. He knows exactly where he sits in a lineage that runs from Atget through Cartier-Bresson to Frank.

The generosity is not incidental; it is the ethic. He treats photography as something to be given away, explained, argued over, and the commentary reflects a man who spent decades teaching as seriously as he shot.

A skeptic could call two fat volumes an act of vanity. Fifty years of one man annotating his own contact sheets is a lot to ask of anyone not already a believer, and the price and heft put it well out of casual reach. There are photographers whose work says everything and whose commentary only gets in the way.

He is not one of them. The talk earns its place because his real subject was always attention itself, the act of staying open long enough for an ordinary street or an empty room to give something up. Reading him think is the closest most viewers will get to standing at his shoulder while he decides whether to press the shutter now or wait.

As an object it matches the ambition: two clothbound volumes in a slipcase, printed with the saturation the pictures demand and heavy enough to feel like a commitment. The set keeps the fast and the slow in conversation, a grabbed New York corner facing a still Cape Cod porch, the pairing making an argument no single image could. It is the rare career survey built to be read as an autobiography and looked at as a gallery.

Which returns to that gap between the quarter-second and the slow minute. By the end, taking his time no longer looks like a technique he adopted on Cape Cod. It looks like the whole point, the thing the fast young man on Fifth Avenue was already reaching for without knowing its name.