Our second exhibition. The first, four months earlier, had been Vivian Maier. A dead-end street at 1,342 metres, a doorbell, and a postcard by the door with the show's name: "License to See".
If I could take one photographer to a desert island, I would take Joel Meyerowitz. And this house is my desert island. So I did not offer him an exhibition: I offered to flood the house with his photographs, room by room. He liked that, and said yes.
He was twenty-six when Szarkowski hung one of his photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, and thirty when it gave him his own show. Then the great museums and collections. Then a gallery four months old, in a house, in a village of a thousand people, in a country of eighty thousand. He told me he had never shown anywhere like it.
In a white cube a photograph has only the other photographs to talk to. In a house it also talks to the room: to the light crossing it all morning, to the window with the valley in it, to the mirror that hands it back to you from the other side. Nothing here is neutral, and that is the idea.
Twenty-five prints, and he made every one himself, meticulously: a great photographer is not always a great printer. In a house you find out: they hang in daylight, beside a window, with no spotlight, and they hold. They hung in the rooms where we live: the corridor, the bookshelves, and over the sofa, the still lifes he made with Giorgio Morandi's own objects.
That season La Vanguardia drove up and called it "photographs at the summit" and wrote that this house had become a place of pilgrimage in a country with no photography museum. What surprised everyone, we told them, was that the gallery is a private house, not a white cube.
The show stayed up until the end of May. To see this house you have to mean it: ninety-five per cent of those who come cross a border for it.
Works: Florida, 1978 · Madison Avenue, New York City, 1974 · New York City, 1978 · Land, Provincetown, 1976 · Gold Column, Provincetown, 1977 · Málaga, Spain, 1965.
Click on any photograph to see its technical details and availability.
