The photography exhibition Joel Meyerowitz. Europa 1966-1967, produced by the Museo Picasso Málaga and on view there from June to December 2024, has travelled to Madrid as part of the PHotoEspaña 2025 photography festival. It will be on view at the Fernán Gómez Centro Cultural de la Villa from May 15 to July 13.

This outstanding exhibition of early work by the renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz (New York, 1938), curated by Miguel López-Remiro, artistic director of the Museo Picasso Málaga, brings together more than 200 photographs taken by Meyerowitz during his European trip in 1966–67, many of which had never been shown before.

The show features large-format prints from the period, in both colour and black and white, and provides a comprehensive overview of Meyerowitz’s travels around England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, Turkey, Greece and Italy, highlighting the importance of his extended stay in Spain. Tracing his artistic development during his time in Europe, it includes portraits of prominent locals, unique moments captured in everyday street scenes, and urban and natural landscapes. It also contains a selection of original prints from his first solo exhibition at the MoMA.

In 1966, at the age of 28 and shortly after quitting his job at an advertising agency in New York to devote himself to photography, Meyerowitz embarked on a road trip that would take him across Europe for a whole year. He travelled more than 30,000 km through 10 countries and took some 25,000 pictures. During this time, the photographer settled in Málaga for six months and befriended the Escalonas, one of the city’s most prominent families of flamenco artists. Throughout his stay in Málaga, Meyerowitz took 8,500 photographs and made countless high-quality sound recordings of the flamenco performances he attended.

This unique experience, which resulted in an extraordinary photographic record of Spain, had an enormous influence on Meyerowitz and made a lasting impact on his distinctive photographic style. Today Meyerowitz is recognised as one of the most prominent photographers of his generation who redefined the way reality is captured and conveyed with a camera, particularly in colour. After returning to New York, he had his first solo exhibition at the MoMA in 1968, which included 40 photographs taken from the window of his car during his trip around Europe.

JOEL MEYEROWITZ: WINNER OF THE PHOTOSPAÑA 2025 AWARD

Coinciding with the presentation of the exhibition in the capital, Joel Meyerowitz received the PHotoEspaña 2025 Honorary Award, and expressed his gratitude for this recognition of his professional career.

The work of the award-winning photographer Joel Meyerowitz has been shown in more than 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. His discovery of the pictures taken by the photographer Robert Frank in 1962 marked the beginning of his dedication to this art form. While most photographers back then worked with black and white film, Meyerowitz was one of the first artists to use colour before colour photography came to be accepted as an art form.

Meyerowitz has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship twice, has received the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities awards in the United States, and the Centenary Medal of the Royal Photographic Society 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 Architecture Biennale in 2002. Meyerowitz’s photographs grace the collections of major institutions such as the MoMA, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. He is represented by the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, the Polka Gaie in Paris and Huxley-Parlour in London. Meyerowitz works and lives in New York and London. This list of awards and recognitions has now been joined by this one received at PHotoEspaña.

PHotoEspaña 2025 invites visitors to reflect on photography as an instrument of memory and critical confrontation and an agent of change, featuring major names on the national and international scenes in shows that strengthen its presence in the major museums in the Spanish capital. Now in its 28th year, it has established a reputation as one of the most important international photography festivals.