Meyerowitz was born in the Bronx, NY to working class Jewish parents who had immigrated to the United States from Hungary and Russia. He attended Ohio State University, graduating in 1959. In 1962 he quit his job and pursued street photography in NYC. After alternating between black and white and color, he "permanently adopted color", and was an early advocate of the use of color during a time when there was significant resistance to the idea of color photography as serious art.