The celebrated New York-born photographer Joel Meyerowitz was 28 when he went to Málaga in 1966. He was on a road trip through Europe, 20,000 miles and 10 countries, but in Andalucia he found something like the authenticity he had been looking for. A friend of a friend introduced him to flamenco musicians in the Romany quarter, and he spent six months taking pictures, observing their lives. The Escalona family, members of which are pictured here, could trace their musical lineage back to Antonio Escalona, whose guitar-playing had inspired the revolutionary poet Federico García Lorca.

By the time Meyerowitz reached Málaga, the city had lived under General Franco’s dictatorship for nearly 30 years. Flamenco had an ambiguous position in a society dominated by church and state. It was allowed as a symbol of Spanish nationalism – a natural barrier to subversive rock’n’roll – but carried with it traditions of rebellion and freedom. A new exhibition of Meyerowitz’s pictures from that period has just opened at the Picasso Museum in Málaga.

Many of the images, such as this one, are celebrations of Meyerowitz’s pioneering use of colour film at a time when nearly all serious street photography used black and white. The intensity of life in Málaga seemed to demand that shift; it involved a new way of looking that found interest in every corner of the frame. The four figures here, backed by the two-tone walls, are a case in point: each could be a study in singular character – the old man with half an eye on the wine bottle; the young woman beginning to respond to the age-old dance rhythm of clapping and guitar. The commitment to colour required a painter’s eye, Meyerowitz, now 86, has suggested, and could be made to capture not only a focal point of drama, but a whole field of vision; a way of life.

• Joel Meyerowitz: Europa 1966-1967 is at Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain, until 15 December