The work of renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz was the focus of an unforgettable event sponsored by the Crossroads New York Cultural Center and the Department of Italian at Columbia University this October. Responding to questions posed by Italian photographer Giovanni Chiaramonte, Meyerowitz spoke with depth and candor about his passion for photography and life.
Drawn from the event transcript, these questions, answers, and images evidence an engagement in reality bursting with reason and affection

What relationship do you see between the color and the reality of the world?
I’m an urban photographer and a realist. I don’t wish to colorize things or pump them up. Things as they are really please me. I can get into that kind of drifting reverie in front of something that speaks to me, and I never know what that’s going to be. We’re all the same. Waiting for a bus, walking to a class, you see things every day that make you say, “Ah!” Something in the world has pinched you, grabbed you, awakened you, something has happened to you in that split second, and you’ve understood without long contemplation a lot about what you saw. It could be just a street corner in a town in the Midwest on a sunny day, coming out of the shadows and feeling what sunlight feels like skittering across the streets, and off of the buildings. One realizes there’s no one out there, and suddenly the scale of the buildings, the march of the streets, the materiality of the reality, becomes solid, presence. It opens up a possibility.

Your great book on Ground Zero has just come out, which you worked on simultaneously with a book you had been commissioned to do on Tuscany.
It was an interesting balance. To be in Tuscany was to have a sense of old rituals and order and gentleness and a sense of goodness. Whereas inside Ground Zero, I was living this every day and swallowing it, dust and all, and suddenly found myself as part of the team, which was an interesting change from the solitary artist. Part of the uplift of the place was to watch the way human beings handled the elements of this disaster, the great care with which they treated it.
So I was shuttling back and forth between one space and the other and having to find a sense of meaning from it, and the goodness that I saw in Tuscany really forced my sense of what was going on in Ground Zero. I ran after 50 firemen as they ran over the rubble down into a valley inside the south tower. You see those beams on top? Those are the central core beams that held up the elevators of the south tower, and down in the center where there’s a light, a man came out and announced that he had found five bodies of firemen in a stairwell, and that the stairwell was from the north tower. It was thrown a couple of hundred yards and had crashed into the south tower and was buried until they excavated it here.
Then I found myself literally standing with these other men in Tuscany on that sturdy earth. And look at the way that they stand. You think of them as planted. They are men of the earth. It was nourishing to be reminded that these men exist after having been with the firemen whose frantic energy in the search for their comrades was part of the overall experience of Ground Zero.

At this moment in history when art seems to be abandoning reality, why do you keep taking pictures of daily reality?
Reality just keeps on spinning its repetitions and its newness again and again. There’s always something to discover. It’s part of the innocent joy of photography, to go into the world armed with a tool that might actually hold your thoughts for even a few minutes. And just to walk through the world and see what happens next, see the story being retold for the millionth time and see if it’s still fresh to you. And it’s particularly a challenge as one gets older. I spent 45 years prancing about on the streets fairly regularly. And it’s not so much that I’m jaded by what I’ve seen, but I’ve seen a lot. So the question I ask now is, “What interests me now, 45 years later? What is the world saying in this incarnation of itself to me that is worth looking at?” I go back out on the street and the same buses are running and, you know, more cops on the street, and I have to deal with all that stuff. But at the very least I can say life itself is still… sweet.