Ira Merritt

A native Bronx resident for 67+ years, married with two grown children. He is recently retired from teaching photography for 33 years, the last 24 at the High School of Art & Design in Manhattan. Along with his teaching duties Ira built up the schools’ internship program to be one of the most successful high school internship programs in New York City. Before teaching he worked as a free – lance photographer associate at the Dena Photography Agency in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s and also as a videographer for the Health and Nursing Program at Lehman College in the Bronx. He has been a recipient of four individual artist awards in photography from the Bronx Council on the Arts and has received grants for photography projects including documenting the residents of the Amalgamated Cooperative (the oldest housing co-op in the nation) during their 85th anniversary year. Ira also participated as one of the photographers for the borough wide Bronx Artist Documentary Project which resulted in a traveling show and book. This year he was granted the first one -person show at Metropolitan College Bronx Campus for his series “Ephemeral,” which was photographed in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Ira is also a member of the Bronx Photographers Collaborative and has organized several of their members to document the communities living around the #2/5 subway in the Bronx. Globally he is interested in highlighting the real threat of climate change and is embarking on a nationwide project to photograph the diversity of the American landscape and its relationship with the local residents. The images for this project are assembled into grids and may be viewed as a single photograph or a collection of many similar images. He began this project in May of 2017 at his artist in residency at the Homestead Monument National Park in Nebraska.

In retirement Ira is exploring an interest in print making which began twenty years ago at the School of Visual Arts during a sabbatical he took from teaching. The work first explored the media of etching in which he too his photo collage negatives and turned them into etching plates. Since retiring he has explored the other print mediums of silk -screen, wood – cut, and monotypes; sometimes incorporating all four into mixed media works. Presently he is working on a monotype series called, “Women with Hats,” in which he sketches from photographs he has taken and then through a process learned at Lehman College uses water – color paint to create the monotypes.