© Joel Meyerowitz/Edwynn Houk Gallery
"The White Road," reproduced directly from Meyerowitz's C-print.
Joel Meyerowitz is one of photography's consummate color printers. The C-prints from 8x10 negatives that he began making three decades ago were simply breathtaking -- often odes to pure color. Meyerowitz is no fan, though, of the high-saturation output prized by many digital photographers. "A lot of photographers are seduced by the gaudy, contrasty options that digital printing offers so readily," he says. "They like that juiced-up quality. But I'm trying for the kind of subtlety that the negative is filled with. That's why I use an 8x10 view camera, so I can see everything that's out there, in all of its renditions and gradations."
Meyerowitz, who taught himself Photoshop when it was just three versions old, has experimented with many inkjet printers to see if they can deliver the depth and tonal delicacy he prefers. None satisfied him until the arrival of the HP Designjet 130, an affordable dye-based model that produces 24-inch-wide prints with HP's Vivera six-color inkset. Meyerowitz now uses this printer and its 13-inch, nine-ink cousin, the HP Photosmart 8750, for nearly all of his printing projects. These include a major show of his work from the transitional 1970s at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, to open this October; photographs of the World Trade Center site made in the year after the disaster, to be published in a Phaidon book on its fifth anniversary; and 52 Mondays, a year-long series of quotidian images from Meyerowitz's hometown, New York, all shot with the Olympus E-1 digital SLR. Here Meyerowitz describes the epiphany that led to his digital conversion, and the details of how the Designjet 130's quality has allowed him to retrieve detail from old chromes and negatives that he had simply given up trying to print conventionally.
© Joel Meyerowitz/Edwynn Houk Gallery
"The White Road," reproduced directly from Meyerowitz's HP Designjet 130 inkjet print.
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