Ira Merritt - Falling Noses

Ira Merritt – Artist Statement I am a photo artist and print-maker. Most of my work begins through the photographic process and then may be transformed through experimentation into collages and etchings or remain photographs. Crushed cans photographed and printed in reversal become jewels, hammerheads, skulls, and celestial bodies, sun proofed plants personify fragile and unique personalities, mono-typed feathers are a metaphor for the breakdown in families and a nation under stress, and collaged photo test strips psychologically break down disenfranchised people in a society that has lost its direction. I was born in the Bronx and I still live in the same neighbor-hood I was raised in; a co-op founded on the socialist values of the ladies garment workers. We lived across from Van Cortlandt Park in this socialist utopia where an unsocial child like myself could escape into the wilds of the park or into the ball games I became proficient at playing. Many years later when I took up a camera I would wander into the park and photograph, never with an overall plan on what it was that I hope to achieve only ideas or experiments that I wanted to pursue. I have been photographing the park on and off for over thirty years. In that time I was married, raised a family with two children and taught photography in the New York City Public School system. I have won four BRIO awards (Bronx Honors Its Own), and just recently I am a recipient of a DCA (Department of Cultural Affairs) grant, which helped me pay for the framing and mounting of an exhibit of sun-proofed plants of the park. It is a series in which I married an old technique with a modern scanner. With the success of this series, "Photosynthsis", I wanted some closure with the park so that I can go on to other endeavors and so I have photographed the park throughout the year to witness and document the changing nature of the park through the four seasons. I hope to contrast these new images with the images I made for over thirty years and maybe in doing so I will discover this unbelievable hold the park has had over me.