Photographer Joel Meyerowitz spent time in Morandi’s private Bologna studio, producing a 130-photo-expanded second edition of Morandi’s Objects (Damiani Books, April 2026).
Key Takeaways
Casa Morandi’s non-public rooms gave Meyerowitz unusual access; he photographed the preserved still-life objects, desk, hat, and paint-stiff suit jacket Morandi wore while painting.
Meyerowitz frames Morandi’s object arrangements as deliberate spatial meditation: circles, cylinders, cubes held in “indefinite relationship” between near and far planes.
The project is a crossover for Meyerowitz, a lifelong street photographer known for legitimizing color film, who rarely shot still lifes before this residency.
The second edition adds 130 photos to the 2016 original, with essays by Meyerowitz and writer Maggie Barrett contextualizing Morandi’s natura morta practice.
Barrett explicitly invokes mortality: Morandi is dead, Meyerowitz is 88, and the book is framed as capturing anima before it disperses.
