At twenty-eight he put a car on a boat and drove twenty thousand miles: the British Isles, Europe, Morocco, Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey.
He travelled with two Leicas round his neck, one loaded with colour and one with black and white, to settle which of them said more. The answer has a name and a date: "Cape Light", 1978.
On 3 August 1968 the Museum of Modern Art hung forty of those photographs, all made from the moving car, and called it "My European Trip: Photographs from the Car". John Szarkowski chose them himself. It was Joel's first show of his own at the museum, and he was thirty.
Szarkowski asked in the wall text why a photographer would handicap himself chasing a subject that flies past at fifty miles an hour, and then answered himself: "The old pedestrian's way of seeing the world … seems largely the victim of technological progress. What we see of the world now reaches us as a succession of kaleidoscopic glimpses, unconnected and unexplained."
One of these is taken from inside the car, in Corfu, with the steering wheel at the bottom of the frame and the windscreen in the way: the whole MoMA show in a single photograph. Twenty thousand miles is a long time to be a stranger — and then somebody opens a door, the tambourines come out, and for one evening you are in the room.
The trip ends in the south, in Málaga, where he stayed on.
Every photograph in this chapter can be ordered through the gallery. Three of them are already here: "Afternoon at Jeu de Paume", 1967 · Corfu, Greece, 1967 · Málaga, Spain, 1967. Click on any photograph to see its technical details and availability.
