Joel Meyerowitz: Morandi’s Objects: The Complete Archive of Casa Morandi

The complete collection of Joel Meyerowitz’s photographs of some 300 objects, collected by Giorgio Morandi and depicted in his paintings. A meeting of two worlds – painting and photography – by two great masters in their respective fields. The first edition of Morandi’s Objects is now superseded by the complete archive.

In the spring of 2015 the world-renowned photographer, Joel Meyerowitz, spent time at Giorgio Morandi’s studio at 36 via Fondazza in Bologna. The simple rooms where Morandi painted are awash with objects – vases, tins, shells, bottles and jugs – stacked on shelves, sideboards, chests of drawers and overflowing onto the floor. Attentively and deliberately, Morandi would select these objects and arrange them on makeshift tables so that he could render them, and the light that fell upon them, in oil, watercolour and pencil, creating an elusive body of work that has influenced artists ever since.

Some fifty years after Morandi died, in the very same space, using Morandi’s surfaces and the same light source to cast the same shadows, Meyerowitz lived with the same objects. He carefully took each of them, turning them over in his hands and placing them, one by one, on Morandi’s marked up tabletop. Meyerowitz photographed every object in the studio, and, by instilling each with confidence and individuality, in turn, made them his own.

Morandi’s Objects is an important publication for all those interested in photography, still life and Giorgio Morandi.