Tag: Meryl Meisler

My entire life I have wanted to visit New York, not only to see the sights but to connect with the people who choose to call this fanciful city home. Although I have not physically stepped foot on New York soil, Meryl Meisler’s  photographs makes it seem as though I have. Through her eyes, the people of New York are bold, youthful, emphatic, and somehow vulnerable in an unexpected way. Meisler shows us humanity that is overlooked on a daily basis, year after year. Though her work spans many generations, the emotions that are presented in each photo remain constant.

I love photographs of New York City in the 1970’s and 80’s, when the city was at its worst and at its best, filled with a raw energy, graffiti covered subway cars, fueled by cocaine and poppers, throbbing nightclubs providing endless nights of fantasy and nights of abandon and connection. Fortunately, photographer Meryl Meisler was there to document the craziness, the clubs, and well, all the rest.

I’ve featured Meryl Meisler‘s wonderful photographs on Lenscratch numerous times and needless to say, I’m a fan. Her legacy as a New York City street photographer over the past 40 years ago reveals a grittier metropolis, nights of drugs and disco, and lively neighborhoods filled with small dramas and  daily routines. In celebration of the Lower East Side History Month, Meryl has an exhibition at the The Storefront Project, running through this weekend, June 3, 2018. The exhibition, LES YES!, focuses on the Lower East Side during the 1970s & ‘80s, when as a 1978 CETA Artist grant recipient, Meryl created a portfolio of photographs documenting Jewish New York for the American Jewish Congress.

before she began documenting urban life in New York, Meryl Meisler trained her eye outside of the city, photographing her own Jewish extended family on Long Island’s South Shore. In the early seventies, while home on winter break from studying illustration at the University of Wisconsin, Meisler began experimenting with deadpan self-portraiture, donning the Girl Scouts uniforms and the ballet and tap costumes of her childhood

Photographer Meryl Meisler has a lot going on.  She recently published A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick to much acclaim and will soon be launching a new book, Purgatory & Paradise: Sassy ‘70s Suburbia & The City at the Bushwick Open Studios at The Black Box Gallery in June 2015.  Today I feature work from A Tale of Two Cities, a project that highlights New York in the 1970′s and focuses on two cities existing in very different realities.