For Larry Merrill, retirement is a beginning. After 21 years as director of the Memorial Art Gallery's Creative Workshop, Merrill, whose last day is Friday, will concentrate on his career as a photographer. Judging by his wonderful exhibition, "Pedestrian Photographs," on display through Sunday in the workshop's Lucy Burne Gallery, he is well on his way.
During his tenure at the Creative Workshop, Merrill instituted new programs, expanded and improved a part-time faculty that now numbers 60, and better integrated the museum into the program.
Merrill believes the workshop has provided an appreciation of art and museums for the 3,500 students who enroll each year. It's also given them a sense of what it's like to make art, adding an extra dimension to their appreciation.
"For children, we take an opposite tack to K-12 education about the value of art, which often emphasizes art as a vitamin pill," says Merrill. "Mozart will make you smarter; art will help you with math; art is good for you because it will help you with other things. I've been a proponent of the idea that art is important because art is important. It's often compromised in certain curricula and in the way it's sold in the community. The idea that it brings so many dollars into the economy is not the primary goal of art."
Before taking the mantle at the workshop, Merrill taught photography at Nazareth College. He enjoyed teaching but found that it "essentially used up my energy for doing photography." He preferred the workshop position, where he dealt with meetings, budgets, personnel, and curriculum, but not photography.
During his last several years at the MAG, Merrill has also been employed as a photographer for the World Bank. Between 2002 and 2007, he traveled to Bhutan, Senegal, Haiti, and Peru, photographing the daily lives of artisans. The photographs were used to put a human face on populations considered for micro loans.
But there is no doubt that New York City is Merrill's main focus.
Merrill, who grew up in Brooklyn, began his pilgrimages to Manhattan at the age of 12. At first, around 1960, he and a friend would go to Washington Square in Greenwich Village and listen to folk singers. It wasn't long before they discovered foreign movies, galleries, and museums uptown.
"A 40-minute ride on the subway brought you to this Eden of possibilities," says Merrill.
He began college at McGill University in Montreal. Home for the first break, he went right to Willoughby's on 34th Street and bought a Kowa camera for about $60. He took it back to school and found that he loved photography more than studying. After transferring to Bard College, where he majored in American literature (few schools offered photography programs in the 1960s), he and a friend started a photo magazine.
Merrill can't pinpoint when his photographic love affair with New York began, but he's still fond of pictures of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden that he took more than three decades ago. Although he has lived in Rochester most of his adult life, he returns to New York regularly to take pictures.
"It's my Mont Sainte-Victoire," says Merrill, who lives in Brighton with his wife, Susan Kramarsky (Brighton Town Clerk), and their daughter, Jane. Another daughter, Toby, lives in Manhattan.
Merrill captures Manhattan in a manner that recalls Henri Cartier-Bresson's concept of the "decisive moment." Ironic narratives portray people on cell phones, oblivious to the other humans around them, and tourists posing for pictures, unaware that they are posing for two.
One of the most striking images depicts a man and woman so caught up in their own worlds that they touch each other in a do-si-do as they cross from opposite sides of the street, but do not seem to know it. Merrill had planned the picture - focusing on the two isolated figures framed by the street - to capture loneliness in the middle of the city. He got something far better.
"Harry Callahan said the good ones are a reward for all the bad ones," he says.
In another photograph a boy's right arm is caught in classic pitching motion. His left arm is in another increasingly classic motion.
"What a bucolic scene," says Merrill, "these kids in the park with lots of open space and trees and green. They're playing baseball and they're Derek Jeter in their minds. And the kid's on the freaking cell phone while he's pitching!"
Because Manhattan is so full of people engaged in purposeful action, Merrill's photographs often have a Pirandello-esque quality. When he photographs a group of women posing for their own tourist snapshot, he is stepping into someone else's reality in a way that may prompt viewers to question whose play they are in.
A powerful image that does not involve people involves ventilation pipes at the Queensboro Bridge. Merrill's slightly wide-angle treatment lends an unnervingly futuristic, humanoid quality to the pipes.
In many of the photographs, skewed horizon lines and painted street lines form an abstract geometric canvas traversed by human brushstrokes.
In addition to 48 large reproductions, the handsome exhibition catalog (published by University of Rochester Press) includes an essay by MAG Chief Curator Marjorie B. Searl in which she compares Merrill's work to the cityscapes of Edward Hopper.
The catalog also contains an excellent essay by renowned author Wendell Berry, who Merrill met when a mutual friend (a writer) died and they worked together to have his last manuscript published. When the idea of a catalog came up, Merrill sent Berry a box of pictures and asked him to consider writing something.
"Just when I was thinking he had decided not to do it, I get the pictures back with the essay in the box," says Merrill.