The C/O Berlin is holding an expansive retrospective on American photographer Joel Meyerowitz' work this month. The Joel Meyerowitz: Why Colour Retrospective is curated by Felix Hoffman, chief curator at the gallery for photography and visual media.

The retrospective features Meyerowitz' personal and commercial archive and is centred loosely around the question posed in the title of the exhibition: Why Colour?

It begins with Meyerowitz' earlier work, images in black and white juxtaposed with their colour counterpart and early commercial work. It ends with his most recent, often political images.

If you aren't familiar with Joel Meyerowitz - he is an American street and landscape photographer. Meyerowitz is considered one of the first photographers to use colour seriously in photographic art and championed its use during and after the 1960's. He was one of the artists who influenced some contemporary colour photographer heavyweights. Colour photography has cemented its place in the art world today but it wasn't always a respected medium.

Some older, classical street photographers like Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Friedlander, Brandt, Ray, Kertész, Walker Evans appreciated the supposed objectivity that replaced colour in images. William E Ewing explains it concisely in an interview titled Dreaming in Colour with Nicola Kavanagh at Glass Magazine:

"In black and white, blood may not be blood; in colour, blood is blood."

Early colour-hungry photographers leaned into the subjectivity of colour and argued that it was a more true representation of real life. It was a part of the subjectivity/objectivity discourse in photography around the time. In the end colour photography was seen as a new, different asset. It didn't take away from black and white photography but had its own respected place within the medium.

Colour can compliment a subject; it can transform how something is read and it can elicit intense emotion from an audience - in both real life and an image. Does it really need to be excluded from images and does that truly make them objective? If I feel something from viewing an image of a red rose, am I responding to the red or the rose or to both aspects? How do I read the grey rose as apposed to the red rose? Colour can add context which is incredibly important.

In C/O Berlin's retrospective of Meyerowitz' work you get to see the photographer's early experimentation with colour. Sections of the exhibition juxtapose black and white images alongside the colour image of the same scene, with a very small time difference.

“What freedom! Just being out in the world, shooting whatever spoke to me or suggested itself to my eye. Actually, learning to listen to what speaks to you, rather than prejudging or censoring, is what a trip like that offered. The world is far richer and more interesting than my imagination could conceive of, and by accepting this - which is the approach to photography I still practice, and what I think is at the heart of the medium - I learned not to second guess myself and simply let the world play on my eyes. I think that is why photography still interests me, the inexhaustible abundance of the world’s capacity to reimagine itself has taught me to trust in it and pay attention to what is being offered. Out of that communion comes your work. [...]” - Meyerowitz' own words from the exhibition.

You understand that Meyerowitz considers colour as important as subject. His embracing colour is prevalent in his portraits and street photography. Midway into the exhibition is a framed edition of Sarah: Provincetown, Massachusetts 1982 - a portrait defined by warm hues.

“Anything you have done well is worth letting go of. I was forcing myself to let go of the “incident”, which was how I made photographs since the beginning. Now I was looking at the whole field, the street, human activity, the buildings, the sky, the weather, the temperature of the light, and all of this without the usual hierarchy of content that an incident brought to a photograph. I began to call these “field photographs”, because I wanted everything in the field to be of equal importance and to be read as the overall content of the image. [...]” - Meyerowitz' own words from the exhibition.

The exhibition is highlighted in sections by words from the artist - his retrospective in words. This exhibition champions the idea of new media. It reinvigorates the experimental within the photographer, encouraging speculation in art practice. The work defiantly answers the question posed in the title - "Why colour?", its response is: "Here is why colour".

A great exhibition from C/O Berlin showcasing the progression of photographic art and colour photography in the 60's through one influential artist's body of work.