Photographer Joel Meyerowitz on reframing some of art history’s most famous props: ‘Morandi’s Objects’

In 2015, the photographer Joel Meyerowitz found himself in the preserved studio of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964). Casa Morandi at 36 Via Fondazza in Bologna – a museum that was formed from the artist’s studio and residence after his death – retains the physical legacy of a lifetime of close looking, and is filled with the objects that were the subject matter of Morandi’s celebrated still-life works.

The result of Meyerowitz’s visit was a celebrated and now sought-after book, Morandi’s Objects, first published in 2016 by Damiani. Now, the photographer has revisited his imagery from that trip, creating a new, expanded edition of the book that delves deeper into his relationship with the artist and his lasting influence.

Meyerowitz is not the only visual artist to find solace in Morandi’s totemic imagery – Bridget Niedermair published Horizon in 2016, and countless architects cite the solemn stillness of his compositions as inspiration. Morandi's paintings can be seen in the background of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.

In 2023, Amanda Renshaw curated an exhibition of Morandi’s Objects at Venice’s Palazzo Franchetti. On the occasion of the new publication, Wallpaper* discussed the updated book and the work of the Italian artist with Meyerowitz.

Wallpaper*: Before you started this project, did you consider Morandi an influence on your work?

Joel Meyerowitz: No, Morandi was not a direct influence on my work because I wasn't really a still-life photographer; I was a street photographer. I loved Morandi for his work and for the mystery and spatial joys of looking at this work. I really felt like I had learned a lot from seeing the way he used simple things to make really profound statements, but he wasn’t a direct influence on the work I had done before going to his studio.

W*: What drew you to this project? For art historians, these mostly pragmatic objects are almost sacred – how did it reflect your choice of framing and backdrop?

JM: I had a commission to do a book on Provence. While in Provence, I went to visit Cézanne’s studio in Aix-En-Provence. While in Cézanne’s studio, I noticed he had painted the walls of his studio a dark grey, and on a table against the grey wall, he had painted his still lifes, which were mostly fruit. You’ve seen his apples and oranges; sometimes there were skulls, and sometimes there were some sculptural objects, and occasionally there were bottles in his still lifes.

I was interested in why he used grey. In our contemporary artistic culture, artist studios are generally white boxes. So I began to think about the grey background, and how it made things stand out for themselves, without the contrast of the white wall with the given object.

So when I went back to the place I was living, in Bonnieux, Provence, I set up, as a test for myself, a grey background, and I started putting objects on it to see if I could come up with a really good answer as to why Cezanne did that. I became so interested in moving objects around on a grey background that I felt like I was opening myself – for the first time – to still lifes.

Then, at some point, I returned to Tuscany, where I was living, and I thought, ‘I’m going to go to Bologna and visit Morandi’s studio’; I heard you could go in and see where he worked. So, I went to Bologna, looked at Morandi’s work surface, and saw it was totally different from Cézanne’s, and Cézanne was an influence on Morandi.

My point is, I became interested in objects on backgrounds, because I had never done still lifes. Suddenly, I found myself asking a question. What is a still life, to me? That led me to make more of my own still lifes, and at some point, I thought I would go to Morandi’s house, to that studio, and ask the curators if I could photograph all of his objects and do it on his work table, so that I could show the world what it was Morandi was working with, and how he transformed them.

It was a really simple way of honouring Morandi’s huge effort, over all those years. I promised myself not to assemble objects to create ‘faux Morandis’; I just wanted to show the interested public what those objects looked like, so they could see for themselves how he played with them.

W*: The presentation and framing of the objects is – inevitably – very painterly. Your work has covered a huge variety of subjects, events and places, often capturing dynamic moments. How does photographing static objects compare to this diversity, especially in terms of lighting and framing?

JM: In this case, to honour a single object meant that when I put it on Morandi’s table, the game I played was turning each object slowly and carefully, so as to not remove any of the dust on the object. I carefully turned the object around, so I could see all of its faces, to see if there was one face that spoke to me more than any other position as I turned it.

And it was true! There were objects that, as I turned them, suddenly had character, as if they stood up strong and tall. It might have been from a dent in it, scratches on it, or some angle of it that gave it a presence.

I was looking for presence. Did these objects have their own character, and the question that I asked after that was, did Morandi do that himself, when he was playing with these figures that he was putting on his work surface? Did he turn them around the same way, to see if they offered him a new presence, new energy, a new point of view?

I think I was simply trying to honour each individual object. I never moved the camera; the camera stayed in the same position for the 300 objects I photographed there. That way, they would always be the same size, as Morandi saw them, and the same size for the public to look at them.

What I learned from Morandi’s assembling of objects was that for many years, when I was working on the street, and still true to today, when I raise my camera, its usually because there’s a cluster of people on the street, presenting some kind of field of force, some kind of energy, and some interaction between a group of three or four people who are walking together, and perhaps a couple, off to the right or left of this cluster.

I feel an energy in the space of the street, the light of the street. I tried to translate that into the still lifes that I was making for myself. I was using street energy, or ‘street assembly’, as my thematic undertone to give my arrangement of forms some kind of new feeling, or something that I recognised from the unpredictable outside world I worked in. So, in that regard, I can understand the joys that Morandi gained by playing with his objects over and over again for all his years.

Morandi's Objects. The Complete Archive of Casa Morandi, Joel Meyerowitz, texts by Joel Meyerowitz, Maggie Barrett and Amanda Renshaw, Damiani, €55, DamianiBooks.com, JoelMeyerowitz.com, MuseiBologna.it