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At 88, Joel Meyerowitz Is Still Playing Games

"I figure that, at my age, I can do whatever the fuck I want to do right now."

Some photographers are defined by a single look, a visual language that is evoked at the sound of their name. For Ansel Adams, it was his vertiginous black and white mountainscapes; for Richard Avedon, it was minimal and clinical portraits. Joel Meyerowitz, on the other hand, never bound himself to any one style. Look through his six decades of photographs and one sees chaotic street photography in New York and Paris, large-format landscapes in Cape Cod and Tuscany, delicate portraits and graceful still lifes—some in color, some monochrome. His career has been one of constant reinvention and constant acclaim. When it was announced last year that Meyerowitz would be this year’s recipient of the Sony Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award, no one could have been too surprised.

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A selection of Meyerowitz’s photographs is now on view at Somerset House in London. Past recipients include Mary Ellen Mark, Martin Parr and Sebastião Salgado—all of whom could be identified by looking at any one of their images. Meyerowitz, however, is not so easy to categorize. When I spoke to him next to a sunlit window in Somerset House, I asked him whether his brain works differently depending on what he’s shooting—and what he’s shooting with. “What’s so great about the diversity of the subject matter,” he answered in his soft-spoken New York drawl, “is that it’s a question, a true question emerging from the medium itself. What is a portrait? What is a still life? Do you do it like the Dutch did it in the 1600s? Or do you find a form that feels perfect for today, for the materials you use, for the subject you’re choosing? The way of making it raises issues.”

The range of images on display in this exhibition is disappointingly narrow; rather than........

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