Young Dancer, Empire State Series, New York City is a 1978 photograph by Joel Meyerowitz that already says a great deal about the photographer’s story. A girl in a green dress walks along the pavement, the unmistakable silhouette of the Empire State Building rising behind her. The frame looks stolen, yet everything works perfectly: the orange wall, the light cutting across the building, the product of a casualness that doesn’t feel casual at all. It’s exactly the kind of image the American photographer knew how to find better than anyone else.
Select Works, 1962–2019 is Meyerowitz’s fourth solo exhibition at Huxley-Parlour, bringing together twenty-five works spanning six decades of career. It is not a retrospective in the museological sense, but it functions as a portrait: selective, essential, able to convey not only what the photographer saw, but the way he changed how he saw it.
In the 1960s, Meyerowitz photographed New York with a 35mm camera and a passion for the medium that was hard to put into words. The images from that period are tilted, layered. Meyerowitz himself cited his contemporaries — Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis — as reference points for what he was looking for in street photography.
In 1978 he published Cape Light, the book that changed everything — not just for him, but for the history of colour photography. It’s the moment he put down the 35mm, set up a tripod at Cape Cod and started over. His compositions became meditative, his interiors quiet, his laundry on the line closer to studies in colour and movement. The jazz of the street gave way to something more symphonic. Yet what remained constant across all of Meyerowitz’s shifts was a particular sensitivity to near-invisible phenomena, to things that happen at the threshold of perception.
It’s impossible to talk about Meyerowitz without talking about colour. Alongside Eggleston and Shore, he was among the first to move colour photography out of the advertising territory where it had been confined, and to make it a medium capable of reflecting on form and mood. His was an almost subversive position: monochrome was considered the only serious register, colour belonged to commercials and holiday snapshots. Meyerowitz proved otherwise — not through theoretical manifestos, but through the images themselves.
There is a quote from Robert Frost that Meyerowitz has carried with him like a compass, taken from the 1939 essay The Figure of a Poem: the initial pleasure lies in the surprise of remembering something you didn’t know you knew. It’s one of the most precise descriptions of the kind of vision he practises: not documentation, not invention, but recognition. Select Works, 1962–2019 at Huxley-Parlour works exactly that way — twenty-five images that trace the inner logic of a gaze that never stopped evolving. The exhibition is open until 11 July 2026.
