Before I got this book I wondered if it would be a sort of celebrity biography full of anecdotes about Meyerowitz's life, travels and the people he met. Fortunately, I was wrong, virtually every page is one hundred percent about photography the Meyerowitz way.
The book's nine chapters are in a question-and-answer format which really works well. Lorenzo Braca's questions are in bold type followed by the answer and there is line space between each Q and A, so the reader can easily dip into a subject that captures their curiosity, whether it's cameras, film speed, types of film, differences between color and mono, the creative and composition aspects of a shot et cetera.
People, of course, are mentioned but they are connected to the medium, especially John Szarkowski, Tony Ray-Jones and Gary Winogrand. There are chapters that relate to specific assignments where Meyerowitz has a lot to say about Cape Light (published in 1991) and Aftermath (published in 2006) about the attack on the World Trade Center.
I think it's worth saying that the book is probably three-quarters text. There are 112 photos throughout the book, with a few of them filling a spread but they are included because some of the questions relate specifically to these images. Appendix A in the back pages has eleven one-to-a-page photos of Meyerowitz's best-known work.
Meyerowitz, now in his early eighties and one of the world's great color photographers, reveals in these pages a lifetime's knowledge about his chosen creative medium.
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