Book Review: Joel Meyerowitz, A Sense of Wonder: Fotographie 1962 2022

By NOAH BECKER November 6, 2025

Skira has released a compelling new monograph dedicated to the American photographer Joel Meyerowitz, an artist whose work has long shaped the visual understanding of American life. Meyerowitz’s photographs don’t simply depict the world; they illuminate it. His frames are charged with atmosphere—glowing fields of light, color, and spatial memory that feel both immediate and dream-like.

For those who have followed the legacies of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, or Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz, A Sense of Wonder: Fotographie 1962 2022 will feel like an essential continuation of that narrative. Meyerowitz has been one of the great champions of color photography since the 1960s, pushing the medium at a time when color was still considered secondary to the serious “black-and-white” tradition. The one hundred images included here show how decisively he shifted that conversation.

While it is tempting to classify some of Meyerowitz’s work within a “man on the street” context, doing so would flatten the complexity at play. The compositions are architectural, but they are also deeply human—they reveal a sensitivity to lived experience, gesture, presence, and the subtle drama of everyday spaces. He works with the eye of a painter, and indeed one can sense an awareness of art history in the background of these images. There are echoes of Caspar David Friedrich in the glow and emotional reach of the pictures—light as a kind of metaphysical event.

And of course, one feels the dialogue between photographic eras. The shift from wet photography to digital practice has altered the way young artists relate to the medium. Meyerowitz comes from a world where light passed through chemistry and glass—where images were coaxed from darkness by hand. There’s something poignant, even elegiac, in recognizing how rare that experience has become.

Yet the bridge between approaches remains open. Digital technology has expanded the possibilities of editing, sequencing, and publication, but the essential question persists: how does one translate time, space, and light into a lasting image?

Meyerowitz has been answering that question for over half a century. This new monograph is not merely a document of his career—it is a reminder of why photography matters, and how it can still astonish. A must-have. WM 

Released Oct 21: Joel Meyerowitz, A Sense of Wonder: Photographs 1962-2022 (hardcover, $55, 224 pages, 110 color)