Those white heels are a half-second from dropping, the kicked-up legs about to fold down, the pose nearly over — but Meyerowitz has stopped the picture at its giddiest instant: one model flung backward across the stone ledge, legs scissoring at the sky, the other laughing beside her. They wear cycling jerseys stitched with the sponsors of the road — BP, Michelin, Peugeot — turned into fashion, and the charade is being filmed by the man at the left, hunched into his movie camera.
It is a shoot within a shoot, and Meyerowitz relishes the surplus. Behind the two blondes the white domes of Sacré-Coeur pile up against a churn of cloud, sublime and indifferent to the commerce on its steps; a lamppost, tourists at a railing, a couple at the right. Everyone is watching someone. The glamour here is borrowed and gleeful, sport and sex and advertising fused for a camera that will sell bicycles, and the still photographer catches the machinery and the joke in one frame.
This is Meyerowitz loose in Europe in the late 1960s, still in black and white, still in the wake of Robert Frank, before the color that, with Shore and Eggleston, would remake the medium. He is drawn to the theatre of the street and the theatre of the shoot alike. Issued later as an archival pigment print, the tonalities stay crisp from the pale basilica to the black of the jersey shorts. Few photographers have been so at home both in the museum — MoMA, the Met, the Boston MFA — and in the pleasures of the sidewalk.
Those white heels are a half-second from dropping, the kicked-up legs about to fold down, the pose nearly over — but Meyerowitz has stopped the picture at its giddiest instant: one model flung backward across the stone ledge, legs scissoring at the sky, the other laughing beside her. They wear cycling jerseys stitched with the sponsors of the road — BP, Michelin, Peugeot — turned into fashion, and the charade is being filmed by the man at the left, hunched into his movie camera.
It is a shoot within a shoot, and Meyerowitz relishes the surplus. Behind the two blondes the white domes of Sacré-Coeur pile up against a churn of cloud, sublime and indifferent to the commerce on its steps; a lamppost, tourists at a railing, a couple at the right. Everyone is watching someone. The glamour here is borrowed and gleeful, sport and sex and advertising fused for a camera that will sell bicycles, and the still photographer catches the machinery and the joke in one frame.
This is Meyerowitz loose in Europe in the late 1960s, still in black and white, still in the wake of Robert Frank, before the color that, with Shore and Eggleston, would remake the medium. He is drawn to the theatre of the street and the theatre of the shoot alike. Issued later as an archival pigment print, the tonalities stay crisp from the pale basilica to the black of the jersey shorts. Few photographers have been so at home both in the museum — MoMA, the Met, the Boston MFA — and in the pleasures of the sidewalk.