How Eric Meola Turned a Forgotten Archive Into One of the Most Dazzling Photography Books of the Decade
Welcome to this edition of [book spotlight]. Today, we uncover the layers of 'Bending Light The Moods of Color,' by Eric Meola (published by The Images Publishing Group). We'd love to read your comments below about these insights and ideas behind the artist's work.
What happens when a legendary photographer rediscovers his own work?
Eric Meola began scanning old negatives just to archive them. But the more images he uncovered, the more he saw a clear thread running through his five-decade career. Light and color were always at the center. Instead of making a best-of collection, he created something deeper. A visual memoir filled with rhythm, emotion, and memory. The result is Bending Light, a photography book that feels both classic and entirely new.
It started with a forgotten archive and became something unexpected. A project that began with backups turned into a personal investigation into color, time, and visual language. Meola realized he wasn’t just editing photos. He was uncovering how his way of seeing had changed and stayed the same. The book moves between storm clouds, sea glass, neon, and portraits, all tied together by instinct and attention to mood.
Bending Light is a map of how vision evolves over time.
The Book
Bending Light: The Moods of Color is a vivid retrospective of legendary photographer Eric Meola’s five-decade career, showcasing 100 photographs that explore the emotional power of light and color. Blending intimate portraits, striking landscapes, and bold abstractions, the book is more than a collection, it’s a visual memoir. Each image is accompanied by a story that reveals the moments, influences, and experiments behind the frame. With references to poets, painters, musicians, and storms on the Great Plains, Meola traces how his artistic language evolved through instinct, geometry, and mood. This richly designed monograph is both a masterclass in color photography and a deeply personal reflection on a life spent chasing light. (The Images Publishing Group, Amazon)
Genesis of the project: Bending Light showcases a collection of 100 iconic photographs from your five-decade career. What inspired you to compile this retrospective, and how did you select the images that best represent your exploration of light and color?
This book came about because I decided it was time for me to make high res scans of a lot of my life’s work. In the process of doing that I came across a lot of images I had forgotten about, and at the same time I began to look at my career in terms of its underlying theme: Color. Greg Wakabayashi, the art director I have worked with for the past 15 years, and I spent six months narrowing down an original selection of more than 400 images. One of the main issues for us was not just selecting the images in terms of light and color, but that I would write an extended “caption — a short story — for each image. And there had to be a “cadence” to the way the viewer saw the images. Fortunately, I had plenty of stories to tell, as I wanted the text to describe the vicissitudes of a photographer’s career, as well as write lyrically about the experiences that shaped the way I think about making photographs. So we examined some of my editorial work as well as a few advertising images that were instrumental in establishing my career. It became clear early on that my work has not only a strong streak of geometry, but that I have always emphasized the abstract.
Was there one photo you had overlooked that now feels especially meaningful to you?
Actually there are several. “Motel” brought me back to the period when I spent a lot of time in the Mojave desert shooting ads, and wandering around at night looking for personal photographs. “Acupuncture” is an elegant, Hiro-like beauty profile, and “Independence” is a photograph from Morocco that worked perfectly in the layout as the band of red at the top of this image follows the band of red at the bottom of the image that precedes it, “Bus.”
Influence of other art forms: Your work is informed by writers, painters, and musicians. Can you elaborate on how these diverse influences have shaped your visual language and approach to photography?
Words are very important to me. My major in college was English literature, not photography. Poets, from William Butler Yeats, to Hart Crane, to T.S. Eliot, were a big influence. Early in my career I met the abstract painters Roy Lichtenstein, Jules Olitski, and Kenneth Noland, on an assignment for Time magazine; painters such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko, and Wassily Kandinsky have been a strong influence. The late Dan Flavin, who worked with fluorescent light, has been an enormous influence, as well as the hypnotic spaces of James Turrell. And music, from Bob Dylan to the atonal music of Philip Glass, is always on my mind. I think photographs come out of all of these influences, in the way we synthesize something unique from what we put in our metaphoric soup of architecture, painting, music, and language.
Has there ever been a specific poem or piece of music that directly shaped the way you approached a photograph?
Bruce Springsteen’s song “The Promised Land,” was written during a road trip we took in Utah and Nevada in 1977. A black-and-white photograph of a storm that I made on that trip was instrumental in my deciding to photograph my collection of storm images, “Fierce Beauty,” but in color. The line from the song “There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor, I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm…” was what influenced me to devote the better part of seven years to photographing in the Great Plains.
There’s a line from Hart Crane’s poem “Brooklyn Bridge,” that has stuck with me since I first read it, about the light in New York City:
“Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks, A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene…” There are literally hundreds of songs, poems, paintings, books, that influence us. Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” comes to mind, and Ernst Haas’s photograph “Route 66, Albuquerque.” It’s impossible to delineate how they have influenced me, other than to state they have been imprinted in my mind — the light, the sound, the composition, the color. Out of this “soup” comes something new that may not be directly related to a particular influence, but certainly contains the ingredients of many different influences.
Symbolism and mood: In Bending Light, you examine the symbolism of color and how it affects our moods. How do you approach incorporating these elements into your compositions to evoke specific emotions in the viewer?
I have stated that “color (and light) are my subject as much as the subject itself.” The subject, however, establishes my approach to the light and the color. In the image “Acupuncture,” I went for classic, dramatic lighting, and accurately showing the model’s delicate skin tones; in “Monotone,” I let the cool grays and dramatic contrast stand on its own because of the Arabic script; the harsh acid green and yellow of “Motel” glowing red at night in the Mojave Desert was a startling example of 1960s roadside kitsch, so the color became the subject. Each image is approached on its own, often by instinct, and my sense of how it stands on the color itself. I’m not out to make photographs in color; my photographs are about the color.
Evolution of your style: Over five decades, how has your approach to using light and color evolved, and what key experiences have influenced this progression?
My work with color and light has become more and more abstract over the past five decades. I’ve explored the way light is used in architecture, and how artists, such as Rothko, use color, both contrasting and complementary, to elicit strong emotional responses; they create a deeply spiritual resonance on a two-dimensional canvas. I’m working a lot with glass now, creating abstracts from the way light and color refract within its translucent form. The more than 8 months I spent in India immersed me in the traditions and ceremonies of a place that celebrates color like nowhere else on Earth. And my photographs of storms in the Great Plains introduced me to a universe where nature played with dramatic light and color in a terrifying, yet hypnotic, and ever-changing ballet.
Technical considerations: Your photographs range from intimate portraits to color-saturated abstracts. What technical challenges have you encountered in capturing such diverse subjects, and how have you overcome them?
I was fortunate to begin my career in the golden age of magazines. Every month there would be a new issue of Esquire, or Look, or Vogue, filled with images from Irving Penn, Art Kane, Hiro, and Avedon. It was also the golden age of advertising and you were expected to be able to shoot everything and anything. So from the beginning I was comfortable using formats from 8X10, to 35mm cameras. I never thought of myself as specializing in one format or another. I might shoot an album cover one day, say in 21/4, with a Hasselblad, and a still-life with an 8x10 Sinar the next day, and a 35mm portrait with a Nikon the following day.
That’s what I loved about the world of advertising — it was demanding, and kept you thinking. Some of that came from my mentor, Pete Turner, and much of it came from looking at the work of those whose craft was their style. Penn, in particular, was a huge influence.
Storytelling through imagery: Each photograph in Bending Light is accompanied by stories and anecdotes. How do these narratives enhance the visual experience, and what role does storytelling play in your creative process?
I believe strongly that a photograph should stand on its own with a story, and without a caption. However, in a collection of images that trace my career, I deliberately wanted to tell the stories behind each image, as the editing process brought back so many memories with regard to the craft and process of making photographs. As I edited the selection I realized how much of my growth as a photographer came from the empathy I felt with my subjects, especially when I worked on my book for Kodak, “Last Places on Earth.” I wanted to express the lyrical connection that photographers have with light, gesture, and place.
Working for months in America’s Great Plains while shooting storms made me want to go back to photograph the commonplace — churches, roads, and prairie fires — that gave context to where the storms occur.
Recognition and impact: Receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Professional Photographers of America in 2023 is a significant honor. How has this recognition influenced your perspective on your body of work and your future projects?
Although it’s always an honor to be recognized and receive validation, what motivates me now is exploring the gift each photographer has been given; we are all part of an art and a craft that is just 200 years old. There’s a lot more to explore, and culling the images for this book has made me turn up the rheostat. So I’m going in two directions; one is to generate new images and the other is to make sure that whatever legacy I leave behind is documented in high resolution scans, prints, and stories.
Advice for emerging photographers: Given your extensive experience, what advice would you offer to emerging photographers aiming to develop a distinctive style that effectively uses light and color?
See the color, don’t just shoot in color; shoot the things you love, but take risks; go outside your comfort zone; shoot every day; take road trips; make images, not social networks; remember that the mundane is often more interesting than the flashy; make mistakes and learn from them.
Future endeavors: Looking ahead, are there new themes or subjects you wish to explore that continue your fascination with light and color?
I’m fascinated by the work of the late Stephen Knapp, who worked with dichroic glass to create “light paintings.” Recently, I’ve been photographing sea glass to create abstracts that have a luminosity and translucency that I haven’t been able to capture in any other way. And I’ve always wanted to photograph flowers, so I’ve been using the sea glass abstracts to create abstracts of flowers. As Ernst Haas said, “I’m not interested in shooting new things; I am interested in to see things new.”
How has experimenting with translucency changed your understanding of color compared to earlier in your career?
Photographs are flat and two-dimensional, despite the use of receding lines through perspective. The same holds true for color in photographs. Luminosity (translucency) is a way of adding dimension to create shades of color that only exist in gradations. I have learned how to create multiple layers of gradated color, and to bend light so that the light is no longer simply linear.
Some of my experiments with color and light take weeks, or even months to work out; one experiment fails, but leads to another; a “glass” abstract becomes a “flower” abstract. Right now I am experimenting with complex forms that can’t be categorized as thematic. I tend not to think far ahead; the process for me is subjective. I would love to do a series of photographs of unusual birds, for instance, or I think I would. Until I get there, or try, I will never know.
To discover more about this intriguing body of work and how you can acquire your own copy, you can find and purchase the book here. (The Images Publishing Group, Amazon)
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