Larry Merrill will be chair of the panel of judges for the “III Photography Contest: Your Eye Outside”

The prestigious photographer Larry Merrill will be chair of the panel of judges for the “III Photography Contest: Your Eye Outside”, a contest where awards will be given to the best instant photographs taken by IE University Architecture students when in Turkey. These students recently traveled to Turkey to discover its architecture and its international influence. The winners of this contest will be announced next week.

Larry Merrill has been taking and exhibiting photographs for over thirty years.  In his most recent exhibition, Larry Merrill: Looking at Trees, at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, his work centered on the intentional act of looking as reflected in large format photos.  He skillfully captured remarkable images of trees, poetically expressing such themes as the texture of bark, a subtle color palette, or the qualities of light under a sunlit canopy of leaves.

Merrill has also had solo exhibitions at other prominent museums and galleries in Rochester, New York, Washington, D.C., and New York City.  He has photographed for the World Bank in Bhutan, Haiti, Peru, and Senegal.   Parallel to his own photographic work, Larry Merrill has been played an important role in museums and education.  He served as director of the Creative Workshop at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, New York. He was guest curator of The Camera and the Photograph: Images in Light, in the Uris Education Gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

His photos are in the collections of: the George Eastman House; the Israel Museum; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Museum of the City of New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Yale University Art Gallery; the New York Historical Society;  and the World Bank. A beautiful and thought-provoking monograph, Pedestrian Photographs, depicting street life in New York City, was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2007.