ABOUT THE LIMITED EDITION

Taking My Time is the retrospective monograph covering the life and career of Joel Meyerowitz and provides you with an unprecedented insight into the mind and work of this iconic American photographer. 

This two-volume limited edition is presented in a slipcase and includes a signed print (Paris, France, 1967), a DVD of Meyerowitz’s award-winning film, Pop, a unique 'graphic novel' insert that tells the story of Pop and a second insert for Meyerowitz's lesson in colour versus black and white photography. 

Showing the growth and development of Meyerowitz and his photography from the 1960s to the present day, Taking My Time explores the pivotal points of Meyerowitz’s career and his experiments in both colour and black and white photography and explorations of human intimacy, architecture, light and space. Including text that Meyerowitz, one of photography’s most articulate practitioners, has contributed, Taking My Time is a unique body of work and an unbeatable account of a significant period of evolution in photography.

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Beautifully sequenced and edited with Meyerowitz himself, and including his own personal accounts, this extensive and personal monograph charts his complete development as a photographer. As an exceptionally diverse and renowned practitioner of his craft, Joel Meyerowitz is best known for pioneering the use of colour photography as an art form, as well as for his witty and subversive ability to capture off-guard moments with humour and affection. 

Showing the growth and development of Meyerowitz and his photography, Taking My Time is arranged into discrete bodies of work, split over two volumes, which explore the pivotal points of Meyerowitz’s career as his evolution as an observer of human life as it unfolds. The reader is afforded access to his complete oeuvre, from his formative years in 1960s New York, to his travels around Europe, Cape Cod in the 1970s, St Louis and beyond. In later years, his sheer persistence and integrity made Meyerowitz the only photographer granted access to the World Trade Center site and his work serves as an official archive and indispensable tribute. 

Beginning his photographic career on the bustling streets of New York in the 1960s, Meyerowitz translated the chaos of the city – alive with lights and cars, businessmen and street vendors – into images that are both carefully choreographed and wonderfully accidental. This energy and sense of heightened awareness pervade all of his photographs. It was as an early advocate of colour photography that Meyerowitz has had greatest influence, for he was instrumental in changing the attitude towards the use of colour from one of resistance to nearly universal acceptance. Meyerowitz’s career has taken a highly diverse trajectory, to create a unique, intimate body of work, which explores his own life and artistic journey. 

Taking My Time also covers his most recent work in Japan, Tuscany and the Legacy series in the parks of New York City, as well as the never-before-published series 'The Elements'. In 1998, Meyerowitz produced and directed his first film, Pop, an intimate diary of a three-week road trip he made with his son, Sasha, and his father, Hy, who suffered from Alzheimers. It is both an open-eyed look at ageing and a meditation on the significance of memory and is featured in the book both as a DVD of the original film, and in a specially created 'graphic novel' insert in Volume II. Another special insert, in Volume I, sets out paired images in both colour and black and white to provide unique lessons in the two mediums of photography. 

The book features a newly-commissioned introduction by leading photography writer Francesco Zanot, charting the development of Meyerowitz's career and setting his work within the broader context of the history of photography. Defining images from throughout his career are also investigated with expanded, personal captions written by the photographer. Meyerowitz has always captured moments that would pass other photographers by: noticing the precarious prospects of a child within a crowd, the inadvertent positioning of strangers beside one another and the macabre connotations of a mattress trussed up on a car roof and in Taking My Time the photographer offers personal insights and anecdotes behind these images. 

From the embers of ground zero in New York and the sublime stillness of the Atlantic sea, to pioneering colour street-photography of the 1960s, Taking My Time offers, in Joel’s words, ‘the richness of life that photography shows us.’

SIGNED PRINT: PARIS, FRANCE, 1967

'A young man lies on the sidewalk with his arms outstretched. A workman with a hammer casually steps over his fallen body. A crowd stands at the entrance to the métro, stunned by curiosity into inaction. A cyclist and a pedestrian each turn over their shoulders to catch a last glimpse, while around them the traffic glides by. Which is the greater drama of life in the city: the fictitious clash between two figures that is implied, or the indifference of the one to the other that is actual? A photograph allows such contradictions to exist in everyday life; more than that, it encourages them. Photography is about being exquisitely present.' Joel Meyerowitz

DVD: POP (1999)

'In November 1995, my son Sasha and I flew to Fort Lauderdale, Florida to pick up my father, Hy, who has Alzheimer's disease. We took him on a slow, back road journey up to New York City, where he was born. Although I could articulate the purpose of the trip before it began, the depth of the experience and its real meaning became clearer to me as the trip unfolded. This was to be an odyssey. Three men, three generations of the Meyerowitz family - my father, a retired salesman, myself, a photographer and filmmaker and my son, also a filmmaker, each of us exactly 30 years apart - would travel together from Florida to New York City - to the Bronx actually--where my father had lived most of his life and where I was born. Our quest was to see if along the way the adventures and experiences we would have could stimulate his now rapidly failing memory.' Joel Meyerowitz