Bending Light is Eric Meola's love letter to color photography

Well, this book is a pause in the story, so to speak, in that I won’t say it's not the book I wanted to do at this time – I usually find a subject and then stick with it for quite a while – but I'm getting older.

I'm in my mid-70s now and don’t want to look back and see that there were photos I should have scanned or wish I'd taken better care of.

My friend Mary Engel, the daughter of the photographer Ruth Orkin, runs a group that focuses on archiving the work of photographers, making sure that photographers organize it and start to look at outlets for it, potentially donating it to galleries or museums in the future.

I realized that I had never thought of myself as an extremely prolific photographer but the more I started going through my material, I thought I would never be able to archive it all, as there were so many photographs.

As I looked through, I realised I wanted to do a book because I’d be in control of which images didn't go in, as well as the ones that did, and I also wanted to be able to write about them.

My major in college was English literature, not photography, so I wanted to write three or four paragraphs, not so much about where the photograph was taken or how it was taken, but the story behind it, what insight I gathered from it and the energy it gave me to broaden my photographic horizons.

One important aspect of photography that I believe has been lost to a certain degree is that you were expected to be a jack of all trades in the 1960s and 1970s, to be able to shoot a great portrait one day and then the next day, do an incredible landscape and the day after that, a still-life and somehow be the best at everything.

Or at least that's what I took away from working with [commercial photographer] Peter Turner as my mentor. That's how Bending Light came to be – it evolved out of organising my own work and then looking at it from the standpoint of telling stories.

When I first got together with the designer of the book, Greg Wakabayashi, we divided the work into categories: still-life, portraits, landscapes and so on.

The overriding criterion in selecting the images was whether there was a story behind each photograph; there could be a photograph that was tremendous for my career but if there was no story, or there was a story that wasn't particularly informative, then it didn't go in.

I think neutrals are fantastic backgrounds for primary colors. That's why the very first photograph in the book is, on the face of it, a somewhat conventional look at the Empire State Building, except that everything in the photograph is black or grey and there's just a sliver of golden light falling on the building.

This photograph illustrates how you can use a single color to make the rest of the image come together; colors compete with themselves, whether they’re complementary colors or a mixture of colors.

Then, the second photograph in the book, the reflection in the water, contains every color in the rainbow. That's why I wanted to clash those two things – going from grey to the full color spectrum.

It was easy in the beginning but it became very difficult because we wanted to create a flow.

Using music as a metaphor, there had to be a certain flow to the images, yet at certain points, we wanted things to jar a little when turning the pages – like going from the photograph of the Japanese model with an acupuncture needle in the back of her neck [page 75], then you turn the page and there’s a dinosaur shot out in the desert [page 77].

You see this very colorful green stone dinosaur with a neck as long as the model's and you go back and forth… so having a flow to the images was important.

I crossed over in 2003. It was very interesting because, at that time, the discussion was all about how film would survive and what the pros and cons were.

But in retrospect, I think every photographer realised pretty quickly that all of a sudden we had been given a gift.

The gift was that, on one frame, you could be shooting at ISO 25 and, in the next frame, you could have ISO 2500. That was a big improvement – and not having to change or develop film. These things spelt the death of film for most photographers.

Are there advantages to film? I'm sure there are but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy – the more time goes by, the fewer opportunities I have to go out and buy a glass-plate camera. Those days are gone.

The advantages of the process were so significant that a lot of us made excuses in the first couple of years because the colors weren't as good.

The lack of noise wasn't necessarily a bad thing but digital files didn't have the depth that film offered… adding additional pixels and the development of the processing tools in the software took time, more than a decade.

Around 2007 and 2008, I went on a couple of trips to India for the best part of a year and shot everything on a 12MP Canon digital camera.

Looking back at the photos, I wish I could have shot them on a 40MP camera, but I was still able to make 12ft-large blow-ups of many of those images for an exhibition.

It took a while and, even today, there's plenty of room for improvement, but the differences between shooting digital in 2024 and what it was like in 2003 are quite startling and staggering.

I really like Sony cameras but I've gone back to Nikon because my wife shoots on Nikon and we can swap lenses.

I'm working with a Z 7II and tend to focus on one lens in particular, the Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 VR. I've tried to keep things to a minimum as I get older; I have six or seven Z System lenses but mainly use the 24-200mm.

I find that by restricting myself to a single lens, I get photographs that are a lot better than I would otherwise because you can spend too much time second-guessing yourself and carrying around lots of equipment.

I don't want to carry equipment around any more, I want to have the camera in my hands. We now live in the iPhone age and there’s a huge advantage in narrowing things down to a single lens.

And the Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 VR happens to be one of the best, if not the best, all-in-one, long zoom range lenses around. I use it all the time.

That's an interesting question. Ideally, people who are interested in reading about photography would buy the book and read the stories behind the photos – not that I'm preaching, but the book is informative.

It expresses what it was like to be a photographer back in the 1960s and 70s, and in my case, how that evolved from doing lots of editorial and commercial work to my own work.

I hope people will buy Bending Light as much to read about my photographs as to look at them.