Joel Meyerowitz: Morandi's Objects

The complete collection of Joel Meyerowitz's photographs of some 300 objects, collected by Giorgio Morandi and depicted in his paintings. A meeting of two worlds - painting and photography - by two great masters in their respective fields. The first edition of Morandi's Objects is now superseded by the complete archive. In the spring of 2015 the world-renowned photographer, Joel Meyerowitz, spent time at Giorgio Morandi's studio at 36 via Fondazza in Bologna. The simple rooms where Morandi painted are awash with objects - vases, tins, shells, bottles and jugs - stacked on shelves, sideboards, chests of drawers and overflowing onto the floor. Attentively and deliberately, Morandi would select these objects and arrange them on makeshift tables so that he could render them, and the light that fell upon them, in oil, watercolour and pencil, creating an elusive body of work that has influenced artists ever since. Some fifty years after Morandi died, in the very same space, using Morandi's surfaces and the same light source to cast the same shadows, Meyerowitz lived with the same objects. He carefully took each of them, turning them over in his hands and placing them, one by one, on Morandi's marked up tabletop. Meyerowitz photographed every object in the studio, and, by instilling each with confidence and individuality, in turn, made them his own. Morandi's Objects is an important publication for all those interested in photography, still life and Giorgio Morandi.

Joel Meyerowitz (b. 1938) was trained as a painter, but an afternoon spent with Robert Frank in the early 1960s changed his destiny. In the years that followed, Meyerowitz dedicated himself to photography. In 1963 his work was selected by John Szarkowski, Director of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art to be included in the seminal exhibition The Photographer's Eye. Over the following decades he mastered black and white and became a pioneer of colour photography, instrumental in changing the art world's attitude to it being accepted as an art form. His photographs of the streets of New York and other American cities are iconic in the history of photography. He is internationally regarded as one of the most important and influential street photographers and has co-authored Bystander, the standard work on the genre. Maggie Barrett is a painter, writer and musician who has written four novels, a collection of short stories and a play that she performed off Broadway. She and her husband, Joel Meyerowitz, are the subject of the film Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other directed by Manon Ouimet and Jacob Perlmutter. Barrett is currently working on a play titled Present Tense. An art historian by training, Amanda Renshaw (b. 1963) has conceived, shaped and written books for over 25 years. She has collaborated with many of the world's leading artists, art historians, intellectual and creative figures. She curated Morandi's Objects by Joel Meyerowitz at the Palazzo Franchetti in Venice in 2023.