The objects in Giorgio Morandi’s paintings, photographed one by one

Joel Meyerowitz enters Giorgio Morandi’s house-studio on a spring morning in 2015. At 36 Via Fondazza in Bologna, the painter’s apartment has by now taken on the quality of an almost mythical place. No one is there to welcome him—the artist of still lifes died in 1964—but his presence survives in the bottles, boxes, vases, and jars that crowd the studio. Meyerowitz knows those objects well, at least through painting. As a student, he had learned to look at them in Morandi’s canvases; later, in New York, he encountered them again in exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum. Seeing them here, in the space where Morandi observed and restaged them for decades, produces a shift. Meyerowitz chooses to photograph them one by one, almost like a crime scene survey or a taxonomic investigation. From this work comes the photographic book Morandi’s Objects. The Complete Archive of Casa Morandi, published by Damiani Books and due out in April 2026.

Considered one of the most important American photographers of the second half of the twentieth century, Joel Meyerowitz became famous in the 1960s photographing the streets of New York and was among the very few street photographers of his generation to work in color. Since then, he has moved across many areas of photography, from landscape—with the celebrated Cape Cod series—to reportage. In 2001, he was also the only photographer authorized to document the Ground Zero site after the September 11 attacks. This time, however, the photographer accustomed to the vitality of the street is faced with something entirely different: silence.

“The building is sort of a classic Bolognese building, with a wide portico entrance and an inner garden,” he tells Domus. The apartment is larger than he had imagined and also more museum-like than expected: spaces that were once dining rooms or areas of everyday life have gradually been adapted to hold works, objects, and documents. “I was struck by the amount of objects in the studio—they were covered in dust, to the point where it looked like there was fur over many of them.” 

The painter’s studio room is the only space that has remained almost unchanged. The arrangement of glass-fronted cabinets, shelves, small vitrines, books, and materials helps Meyerowitz reconstruct the Italian artist’s working method: from paintings made standing up to still lifes built over sixty years using the same objects, bent over the same table. On the walls, an American collector’s check is still pinned: “This is for the next painting you make—just fill in the amount and I’ll pay.” 

Joel Meyerowitz

But what strikes Meyerowitz most are the traces left on the worktable, marks the painter had drawn to fix the position of objects in his compositions: “I thought I should really do this for Art History: take every object, turn it carefully, and not remove the dust, and look to see where the object revealed its anima, its character, its spirit, its soul.” A process that, he notes, ultimately came to resemble “a kind of cadastral survey of painting.”

Those bottles and jars are not just any objects: they are the same ones that appear across forty years of still lifes painted by Morandi. “They were totemic objects, like a great cast of actors he could always rely on,” Meyerowitz explains. They were, in short, the visual repertoire of an artist who moved very little beyond his studio, who rarely traveled—twice to Rome, a few times to the Venice Biennale—and who built a pictorial revolution while remaining almost always in the same room. Those who know him know him through what he painted. His figure remains withdrawn, almost opaque, wrapped in a domestic reserve that Meyerowitz can only sense by entering his home. And yet, even within that Bologna apartment, where he lives with his mother and three sisters, the young Morandi quickly encounters the avant-garde.

In 1913, leafing through a French magazine, he discovers the works of Pablo Picasso. The reproductions are in black and white, but enough to suggest that forms can be broken down and reconstructed. Morandi tries to do so with what he has in front of him: bottles, boxes, vases, and coffee pots are stripped of their function to be observed as pure volumes. What emerges is a way of painting that deeply marks twentieth-century Italian art and that has often been read as quiet or introspective. The surfaces are compact, the colors muted, the compositions apparently stable. But the balance is always precarious: shadows disorient, proportions shift, objects seem slightly off-axis.

Joel Meyerowitz

Compared to his contemporaries, Morandi’s painting is silent but no less radical: there is both an extreme closeness to reality and a complete estrangement from it. It is precisely this tension that Meyerowitz captures. “I felt that each one of them was a challenge for him; to find its identity, and then merge its identity with the others.” 

At this point, the photographic series takes a precise direction. Meyerowitz does not attempt to reconstruct Morandi’s compositions or imitate his visual grammar. Instead, he chooses to proceed by subtraction: isolating each object, rotating it slowly, allowing it to emerge for what it is.

In Morandi’s Objects. The Complete Archive of Casa Morandi, each object belonging to the artist appears isolated on yellowed newsprint—the same material Morandi used as a working backdrop. Meyerowitz deliberately avoids any composition that might recall those of the painter: “I didn’t want to be, in any way, trying to repeat or create a Morandi—that’s just a fool’s error.” Instead, he leaves the objects alone. He treats them as portraits.

The photographic work thus becomes a minimal and persistent investigation: rotating each object until a point of greater intensity emerges, “something that had slightly more energy than any other part of it as I turned it.”  The result is a book that, like Morandi’s paintings, produces that subtle estrangement that can arise from controlled and heightened banality.

For Meyerowitz, it is an artistic process but also a personal transformation: the street photographer, accustomed to chasing “the dance of life in the streets,” is forced for the first time to stop. “It slowed me down completely.”  “To pick a revered object… was really an act of reverence.” 

There are movements in the world that make very little noise. Movements that have to do with the hidden grammar of things, with the shifts of thought and those of light. And Morandi’s true lesson, beyond painting, is perhaps learning to feel the need to stop in order to see them. “It wasn’t a sunny studio… it was a room with north light… subtle and constant.” 

All images: Credit: Joel Meyerowitz - Courtesy of and published by Damiani, a publisher internationally recognized for excellence in art and photography books