Joel Meyerowitz: Dialogues

Huxley-Parlour is delighted to announce a new exhibition of work by American photographer Joel Meyerowitz, his fourth with the gallery. The exhibition, which coincides with an important display at Tate Modern, explores Meyerowitz’s unique approach to colour and light.

For the exhibition at Huxley-Parlour, Meyerowitz presents his work in pairs in order to reveal unexpected parallels in his imagery, while highlighting the enduring, experimental use of colour throughout his oeuvre. Meyerowitz terms the pairs featured in Dialogues ‘relational’ images; as each pair is visually linked by light, colour or composition. This curatorial concept links the two exhibitions at Huxley-Parlour and the Tate. Both use pairings to investigate the development of colour in the artist’s work, as well as his characteristic use of complex compositional structure and unresolved, non-hierarchical imagery.



Meyerowitz’s imagery marries a distinctly American aesthetic with a meditative and contemplative approach to colour. Spanning the years 1964 to 2011, the survey exhibition at Huxley-Parlour reveals Meyerowitz’s enduring interest in the sensorial, evocative experiences of his surroundings. Paired with lesser-known images from the artist’s extensive archive, the exhibition features some of Meyerowitz’s best-known imagery, including early street work and images from his seminal series Cape Light.

Meyerowitz is widely acknowledged to be one of the first photographers - amongst others such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore - to bring colour photography from the periphery to the centre of fine art photography. Historically, where black and white photography was understood to be a serious medium, colour was widely considered to be technically inferior and aesthetically limiting - occupying the realm of advertising campaigns, television, and personal holiday photographs.

In defiance of this, Meyerowitz’s work demonstrated how the medium allowed nuanced contemplation of form, composition, and mood.

The ongoing display at Tate Modern, London sees Meyerowitz’s move from colour to black and white in the 1960s, when the artist began embracing the limitations and aesthetics introduced by colour film. On view are works from A Question of Color, in which Meyerowitz, having carried around two cameras, paired black-and-white and colour prints of nearly the same scene.



Joel Meyerowitz (born 1938, New York) has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries internationally over a span of sixty years. Major solo exhibitions include: the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago. Meyerowitz has published fifty three publications, including Cape Light (1978), St. Louis and the Arch (1980), Wild Flowers (1983), Redheads (1990), Bay/Sky (1993), and The Water’s Edge (1996), and a two volume retrospective publication, Taking My Time (2013). His most recent publication, Joel Meyerowitz: A Question of Color was published by Thames and Hudson in 2023. He is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities awards and a two-time Guggenheim Fellow. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Meyerowitz lives and works between New York and London.