Episode 25: Meryl Meisler
Self Portrait, The Ballerina, N Massapequa, NY June 1975.
I consider these podcast interviews more oral histories, where I have cultural creatives talk intimately and honestly about how following their passions has molded their lives and careers—what choices they’ve made, where it’s led them and how they created the lives of their dreams. I try to create a space where they feel that they can openly discuss every aspect of the ups and downs, as well as the total magic and inspiration that comes from doing what they love to do.
A photograph of Meryl’s mother taken by her father in the 1940s.
My latest guest is Meryl Meisler, a wonderful photographer known mostly for her documentary and street work—her adventures at nightclubs like Studio 54, her time as a teacher in a burned-out pre-gentrification Bushwick. In June I went with her to her show at ClampArt and then interviewed her in her home at Penn South, an affordable cooperative housing community in Chelsea. That initial conversation was cut short so a few weeks ago we spoke again, to delve a little deeper.
Meryl’s acclaim as a photographer has come to her later in life. As she discusses in this conversation, she grew up on Long Island in a family of amateur photographers. Shooting the world around her came naturally to her, so she studied photography in the 1970s with Cavalliere Ketchum and Lisette Model. While working as a freelance illustrator, she received a 1978 CETA Artist grant with which she created a portfolio of photographs that explored her Jewish Identity for the American Jewish Congress.
Butterfly Bedroom Telephone, East Meadow, NY, June 1975.
Meryl found the instability of the freelance life ill-suited to her personality and mental health, leading her to become a photography and art teacher in the New York City public school system. She continued to photograph—not only shooting documentary images of her day-to-day life, but also other works that she would hand-paint. These hand-painted images led Adobe to contact her in the early 1990s; under their tutelage she became one of the earliest artists to learn Photoshop, which allowed her to produce elaborate under-the-sea narrative images that were exhibited large-scale in some of New York’s most famous public buildings and across the subway. Meisler used her knowledge of this nascent technology to introduce digital art into her public school programs.
It wasn’t until a few years before her retirement (taken in 2010) that she began to delve into her old, boxed-up contact sheets and negatives—displaying a New York that was long gone, captured in a totally individual and unique manner. She started exhibiting photos from her teaching days in early 80s Bushwick in 2007, leading to her first book in 2014—Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick. I first came across Meryl’s work in 2015, around the publication of her second book, Paradise & Purgatory: SASSY ’70s Suburbia & The City. The images that captured my attention at the time were ones she had taken of her family on Long Island in the 1970s—revealing, intimate and fun, they are photos that truly capture a time, a place and the personalities of the people in them. Meryl’s photos really feel immediate—they make the viewer feel as if they are there, in the moment with her.
One of Meryl’s hand-painted images, Fire-Hydrant.
Now 70, Meisler’s photographic career has undergone a renaissance; in addition to publishing three books of her photographs (her newest, New York PARADISE LOST Bushwick Era Disco, was just released), she has participated in countless gallery exhibitions including three this summer. Her photos are time capsules of a period, cultural documents, but also love letters to New York—its messiness, its wildness, its paradoxes, the beauty and the openness that attracts all types of people. It’s easy to see why they’ve garnered so much attention—her love and acceptance of all of the people and places in them is palpable.
Mapping, one from Meryl’s series of underwater digital images.
Meryl and her wife now split their time between Chelsea and upstate New York, where she has a darkroom to create her exhibition prints. This interview extensively covers her childhood on Long Island, how she became a photographer and her creative process, the push-and-pull between creating art and balancing a regular job, New York City in the 70s and 80s, and her future projects. Meryl is a delight—our conversation provides so much knowledge about the endless bounty of continuing to create and finding inspiration in every moment.
If you are in New York and listening to this in the autumn of 2021, Meryl’s Bushwick photographs will be installed on walls outside of the school she taught, IS 291, as part of the Photoville festival from September 18th until December 1st.
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Beauty Salon. Bushwick, circa 1984.
Meryl Meisler books for your library:
