In 1966, shortly after quitting his job at a New York advertising agency at the age of 28 to pursue a career in photography, Meyerowitz embarked on a road trip that took him around Europe for an entire year. He travelled more than 30,000 km through 10 countries and took some 25,000 photographs. During this period the photographer stayed in Málaga for six months and became friends with the Escalonas, one of the city’s traditional flamenco families. While in Málaga, Meyerowitz took 8,500 photographs and made countless high-quality recordings of the flamenco performances he attended.

This unique experience, which resulted in an extraordinary photographic record of Spain in the throes of the Franco dictatorship, influenced Meyerowitz enormously and had a lasting impact on his characteristic style. Today Meyerowitz is acknowledged as one of the foremost photographers of his generation who redefined the way of capturing and conveying reality with a camera. On returning to New York, he had his first solo exhibition at MoMA in 1968, which included 40 photographs taken from his car window during his travels around Europe.

This exhibition, curated by Miguel López-Remiro, artistic director of the Museo Picasso Málaga, features vintage prints as well as new colour and black-and-white prints. It offers a broad survey of Meyerowitz’s travels around England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Greece and Italy, and focuses on the importance of his long stay in Málaga.

Joel Meyerowitz (born in New York in 1938) is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. His discovery of the photographer Robert Frank in 1962 marked the beginning of his dedication to this art form. Whereas most photographers of the time worked in black and white, Meyerowitz was one of the first artists to use colour film before colour photography became recognised as an artistic medium. Meyerowitz has received two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships, the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities awards in the United States, as well as The Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal in the United Kingdom. He has published 53 books. His photographs of Ground Zero after 9/11 led him to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale for Architecture in 2002. Meyerowitz’s photographs can be found in the collections of major institutions such as the MoMA, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. Joel Meyerowitz works and lives in New York and London.

Paris, 1967 © Joel Meyerowitz

London, 1966 © Joel Meyerowitz