January/February 2015
Photographer Larry Mayer
Interviewed by SAN Editor C.J. Shane
Photographer Larry Mayer
Interviewed by SAN Editor C.J. Shane
Larry Mayer
SAN: Larry, tell us a little about yourself.
Larry Mayer: First please allow me to thank you for the time you’ve invested in this interview, for all the positive comments that you make throughout, and for weaving me into the tapestry of artists in the Sonoran Desert.
I was born in Brooklyn, NY when Ebbets field was still home to the Brooklyn Dodgers and kids took the subway to baseball games unsupervised by adults. My parents, who were Holocaust survivors, found their way to Brooklyn after the war. I was raised in an environment that reinforced metaphysical traits that transcend tragedy, honor life, and promote beauty through a balance of actions. Although I developed a sense of wonder and apprehension simultaneously and spent most of my free time on the streets in the melting pot that was NY at the time, I was an idealist from a young age.
SAN: You are by profession a geoscientist, correct? What are your areas of research interest in the geosciences?
LM: My first profession was as a bread baker (today it’s called artisan bread making), which I learned through apprenticeship under my father. During this time I was still attending Far Rockaway High School (whose more notable graduates included Nobel prize winners Richard Feynman and Burton Richter), enrolled in advanced chemistry, and taking portrait and street photos. I worked as a baker to earn my way through college and after a series of majors such as chemistry, history, philosophy, I finally settled on Earth Sciences. Earth Science, for me, meant understanding the physical world I lived in. It resonated with my instincts for practical knowledge, and for being outdoors in beautiful landscapes.
After starting a family, graduating, and working professionally, I decided to go to graduate school at The University of Arizona. My connection to the desert blossomed. I realized opportunities to understand things that were previously muted by geographic region and by my own youthful ignorance. By the time I finished graduate school, I felt that I could help others understand what I learned in order for them to make better decisions, and also continue my own learning process.
For a period of time I worked as a University professor teaching geosciences and environmental science, and as a researcher in geosciences, specifically focusing on processes that take place at human time scales but may also operate for very long periods of time. I’ve studied these processes at various spatial and temporal scales, on the ground and from satellite data too. Examples include earthquakes, landscape evolution, water resources, flooding, climate processes, and how these all interact with individuals, economies, and societies.
Larry Mayer: First please allow me to thank you for the time you’ve invested in this interview, for all the positive comments that you make throughout, and for weaving me into the tapestry of artists in the Sonoran Desert.
I was born in Brooklyn, NY when Ebbets field was still home to the Brooklyn Dodgers and kids took the subway to baseball games unsupervised by adults. My parents, who were Holocaust survivors, found their way to Brooklyn after the war. I was raised in an environment that reinforced metaphysical traits that transcend tragedy, honor life, and promote beauty through a balance of actions. Although I developed a sense of wonder and apprehension simultaneously and spent most of my free time on the streets in the melting pot that was NY at the time, I was an idealist from a young age.
SAN: You are by profession a geoscientist, correct? What are your areas of research interest in the geosciences?
LM: My first profession was as a bread baker (today it’s called artisan bread making), which I learned through apprenticeship under my father. During this time I was still attending Far Rockaway High School (whose more notable graduates included Nobel prize winners Richard Feynman and Burton Richter), enrolled in advanced chemistry, and taking portrait and street photos. I worked as a baker to earn my way through college and after a series of majors such as chemistry, history, philosophy, I finally settled on Earth Sciences. Earth Science, for me, meant understanding the physical world I lived in. It resonated with my instincts for practical knowledge, and for being outdoors in beautiful landscapes.
After starting a family, graduating, and working professionally, I decided to go to graduate school at The University of Arizona. My connection to the desert blossomed. I realized opportunities to understand things that were previously muted by geographic region and by my own youthful ignorance. By the time I finished graduate school, I felt that I could help others understand what I learned in order for them to make better decisions, and also continue my own learning process.
For a period of time I worked as a University professor teaching geosciences and environmental science, and as a researcher in geosciences, specifically focusing on processes that take place at human time scales but may also operate for very long periods of time. I’ve studied these processes at various spatial and temporal scales, on the ground and from satellite data too. Examples include earthquakes, landscape evolution, water resources, flooding, climate processes, and how these all interact with individuals, economies, and societies.
LMayer_I Want My Children to Prosper_
SAN: Have you always been a photographer, or is art photography something you came to later in life?
LM: My first exposure to photography came from a visit to a doctor’s office with my mom when I was very young, perhaps seven or eight years old. There was a pile of magazines in the waiting room and I naturally only looked at the pictures. I can’t be sure if my memory is faithful to history, but I recall being blown away by photographs that I attribute to Martin Munkacsi, Richard Avedon, and Edward Steichen. Munkasci was particularly intriguing given his diverse background that started in Europe and, according to my parents, included a photo shoot with “political” artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Sporadically, I began trying to take photos afterwards, paying for supplies by shoveling snow and the like. One might say I came to that doctor’s office to cure one bug, but left with another one (yes, the shutter bug). Later I learned about more nighttime photography (eg., Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Jack Delano) which required significant practical and technical knowledge about film developing, printing, and optics.
By the time I was a teenager I was using a second-hand Ricoh rangefinder camera with black and white film, and also printed photos in my own makeshift darkroom alchemy lab. I say “alchemy” because alchemists searched for a way to transform metals into gold, where I was transforming silver (silver halides are used in black and white film and gelatin prints) into feelings. As always, I worked to support my photography. What moved me was the sense that a truth could be revealed in a photograph, and often that truth was not physical. I was smitten by the beauty and elegance of such work and I wanted to experience what it was like to create an image that spoke the truth without uttering a word. Images precipitated a form of intimacy with the world around me, a human connection to nature’s aesthetic, and it was good. As a youth I wanted to create a palette with fine reds from Rumi, and broad blues from Neruda, add thick rich yellows from Botticelli, and precise lines from da Vinci, then imagine it all in black and white.
Today (I guess that’s the later-in-life part) I am far less ambitious as an artist in the sense that I prefer to use my own palette, with brushes and tones that come from my own unique history. The connection to life that I experience in the process of my photography is deeply rewarding and refreshingly uncomplicated. I continue to explore a sea of infinite truths, sharing along the way.
LM: My first exposure to photography came from a visit to a doctor’s office with my mom when I was very young, perhaps seven or eight years old. There was a pile of magazines in the waiting room and I naturally only looked at the pictures. I can’t be sure if my memory is faithful to history, but I recall being blown away by photographs that I attribute to Martin Munkacsi, Richard Avedon, and Edward Steichen. Munkasci was particularly intriguing given his diverse background that started in Europe and, according to my parents, included a photo shoot with “political” artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Sporadically, I began trying to take photos afterwards, paying for supplies by shoveling snow and the like. One might say I came to that doctor’s office to cure one bug, but left with another one (yes, the shutter bug). Later I learned about more nighttime photography (eg., Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Jack Delano) which required significant practical and technical knowledge about film developing, printing, and optics.
By the time I was a teenager I was using a second-hand Ricoh rangefinder camera with black and white film, and also printed photos in my own makeshift darkroom alchemy lab. I say “alchemy” because alchemists searched for a way to transform metals into gold, where I was transforming silver (silver halides are used in black and white film and gelatin prints) into feelings. As always, I worked to support my photography. What moved me was the sense that a truth could be revealed in a photograph, and often that truth was not physical. I was smitten by the beauty and elegance of such work and I wanted to experience what it was like to create an image that spoke the truth without uttering a word. Images precipitated a form of intimacy with the world around me, a human connection to nature’s aesthetic, and it was good. As a youth I wanted to create a palette with fine reds from Rumi, and broad blues from Neruda, add thick rich yellows from Botticelli, and precise lines from da Vinci, then imagine it all in black and white.
Today (I guess that’s the later-in-life part) I am far less ambitious as an artist in the sense that I prefer to use my own palette, with brushes and tones that come from my own unique history. The connection to life that I experience in the process of my photography is deeply rewarding and refreshingly uncomplicated. I continue to explore a sea of infinite truths, sharing along the way.
LMayer_Beauty and the Brain_
SAN: How has your work in geosciences affected your photography? And has your art photography had an impact on your geosciences research?
LM: Today science and art share some important characteristics: A need for keen observation, a need to search for what might seem invisible and yet obvious when examined from a different perspective or illumination, lots of patience, and willingness to doggedly persevere after reaching a dead end or after making an error.
Lines and curves, patterns and textures, are all fascinating natural phenomena that mimic realizations of mathematical equations or physical relationships. The awareness of such phenomena enriches both the artistic use of structures and the scientific search for the explanation of natural structures.
Because some of my research involved processing satellite data into viewable images, I had a much easier mechanical transition to digital photography. Similarly, because I was aware of how different a photograph could appear, depending on lighting for example, it was easier for me to understand the underlying physical data in satellite images.
More philosophically perhaps I think that in both contexts, science and art, both of my brain hemispheres might be active, the right brain communicating in the language of images and metaphor, and the left brain analyzing data and communicating in the languages of words and abstraction. I don’t know if that is true, but it should be.
LM: Today science and art share some important characteristics: A need for keen observation, a need to search for what might seem invisible and yet obvious when examined from a different perspective or illumination, lots of patience, and willingness to doggedly persevere after reaching a dead end or after making an error.
Lines and curves, patterns and textures, are all fascinating natural phenomena that mimic realizations of mathematical equations or physical relationships. The awareness of such phenomena enriches both the artistic use of structures and the scientific search for the explanation of natural structures.
Because some of my research involved processing satellite data into viewable images, I had a much easier mechanical transition to digital photography. Similarly, because I was aware of how different a photograph could appear, depending on lighting for example, it was easier for me to understand the underlying physical data in satellite images.
More philosophically perhaps I think that in both contexts, science and art, both of my brain hemispheres might be active, the right brain communicating in the language of images and metaphor, and the left brain analyzing data and communicating in the languages of words and abstraction. I don’t know if that is true, but it should be.
LMayer_All Souls Procession 1
SAN: You do some color photography but most of your imagery is black and white. What is it about black and white that especially appeals to you aesthetically?
LM: Part of my preference for black and white comes from experience with developing and printing photographs from black and white film in a darkroom. However, personally there is something more primordial, more direct, more terse, and less distracting in black and white. There is something artistic just working within the constraints of black and white. When color is fundamentally part of the image that needs to be expressed, I am all in on the color.
SAN: The photographers that you consider an influence are best known for their figurative work. You, too, produce figurative work such as your recent series on Tucson’s All Souls Procession. When working figuratively, what types of images and people attract you?
LM: When working figuratively I look for the moment when an expression, or an action, speaks to me above the quotidian cacophony and says “hey look, look, listen, I am here, this is me, this is who I am, and I am alive.” During Tucson’s All Souls Procession I see people transforming a memory of a loved one into a visible expression, and for me it is a moving experience.
(Click on all images to enlarge)
LM: Part of my preference for black and white comes from experience with developing and printing photographs from black and white film in a darkroom. However, personally there is something more primordial, more direct, more terse, and less distracting in black and white. There is something artistic just working within the constraints of black and white. When color is fundamentally part of the image that needs to be expressed, I am all in on the color.
SAN: The photographers that you consider an influence are best known for their figurative work. You, too, produce figurative work such as your recent series on Tucson’s All Souls Procession. When working figuratively, what types of images and people attract you?
LM: When working figuratively I look for the moment when an expression, or an action, speaks to me above the quotidian cacophony and says “hey look, look, listen, I am here, this is me, this is who I am, and I am alive.” During Tucson’s All Souls Procession I see people transforming a memory of a loved one into a visible expression, and for me it is a moving experience.
(Click on all images to enlarge)
LMayer_All Souls Procession 2
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LMayer_All Souls Procession 3
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LMayer_All Souls Procession 4
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LMayer_All Souls Procession 5
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LMayer_All Souls Procession 6
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LMayer_The Old Saguaro_
SAN: Despite the influence of figurative work, many of your photos are landscapes. You have created lovely series of photos made on the Pacific coast, mountain towns in Italy, and in the Sonoran Desert. How did landscape imagery emerge in your body of work?
LM: Landscapes in the context of aesthetics present an artist with opportunities to study interactions of lines, textures, and light. But I also want to understand what the landscape’s lines reveal about its history, and to explore what is general and what is unique, and to communicate my appreciation for the natural beauty that surrounds us which may include a subdued mathematical or scientific undertone.
LM: Landscapes in the context of aesthetics present an artist with opportunities to study interactions of lines, textures, and light. But I also want to understand what the landscape’s lines reveal about its history, and to explore what is general and what is unique, and to communicate my appreciation for the natural beauty that surrounds us which may include a subdued mathematical or scientific undertone.
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SAN: You grew up in New York City, and you have several beautiful images of the city – some figurative, and others are landscape. Do you think your childhood home will always call to you or have you made a home for yourself as an artist here in the desert?
LM: So far, I think both are true. |
LMayer_Black and White Illusions_
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LMayer-Brooklyn Bridge Park
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SAN: You have produced really stunning images of monsoon rains in the Sonoran bioregion as well as. How has living in the Sonoran Desert influenced your work and your life as an artist?
LM: The Sonoran Desert is a rich geographic region in many ways. Rich in terms of physical beauty, light, biodiversity, cultural history, weather patterns, and its sensitivity to climate change (not to mention sensitivity to economic change), the Sonoran Desert is on the margin regarding its ability to support growing human demands for water. When I wake up to watch the sun rise and slowly illuminate the Catalina mountains during Monsoon season, I see the clockwork of our hydrological cycle tied to global circulation of wind and moisture, dramatic but erratic, systematic yet probabilistic. Water and the storms that deliver water are not things to be taken for granted. Perhaps that is most significant effect on my life as an artist… not to take things for granted, and to be aware of all things ephemeral.
LM: The Sonoran Desert is a rich geographic region in many ways. Rich in terms of physical beauty, light, biodiversity, cultural history, weather patterns, and its sensitivity to climate change (not to mention sensitivity to economic change), the Sonoran Desert is on the margin regarding its ability to support growing human demands for water. When I wake up to watch the sun rise and slowly illuminate the Catalina mountains during Monsoon season, I see the clockwork of our hydrological cycle tied to global circulation of wind and moisture, dramatic but erratic, systematic yet probabilistic. Water and the storms that deliver water are not things to be taken for granted. Perhaps that is most significant effect on my life as an artist… not to take things for granted, and to be aware of all things ephemeral.
LMayer_Mon Soon_
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LMayer_Afternoon Storms_
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LMayer_Monsoon Shadow_
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LMayer_Summer Rain_
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LMayer_Koyaanisqatsi_
SAN: You have made this statement: “I feel compelled to create art/poetry/music and have a bias for truth, love, compassion, Earth and general systems analysis, and still find wonder in photography.” Many artists would no doubt relate to the feeling being compelled to create. What do you think is the relationship of art to science in the context of creativity?
LM: That is a difficult question. Compulsion is a double edged sword. I wonder if creativity is the evolutionary result of survival instincts. I don't know of a difference between creativity in art and creativity in science except for their respective neurological wellsprings and forms of expression.
SAN: This image of birds flying along the California coast is titled Koyaanisqatsi. This is a Hopi language word that means “out of balance.” Are you making a comment in this beautiful photo about the out-of-balance state of global oceans? Or something very different?
LM: Yes, I am saying that despite the remaining beauty in the world, globally there is no effective balance between our modern economies and natural physical systems and ecosystems.
LM: That is a difficult question. Compulsion is a double edged sword. I wonder if creativity is the evolutionary result of survival instincts. I don't know of a difference between creativity in art and creativity in science except for their respective neurological wellsprings and forms of expression.
SAN: This image of birds flying along the California coast is titled Koyaanisqatsi. This is a Hopi language word that means “out of balance.” Are you making a comment in this beautiful photo about the out-of-balance state of global oceans? Or something very different?
LM: Yes, I am saying that despite the remaining beauty in the world, globally there is no effective balance between our modern economies and natural physical systems and ecosystems.
LMayer_The Phenomenology of Ripples_
SAN: You have a website, yet rather than post your photos on your website, you post most of them in your Google + page? Why is that?
LM: Google+ is an ongoing experiment for me where, among other motivations, I wanted to understand to whom my photography might appeal. I’ve posted a variety of images and now believe that my work is of very limited general appeal, but strongly appeals to a very, very small niche group. Also, I don’t want to spend time being a webmaster.
SAN: Your postings in Google + under the hashtag #sciencesunday have been both very informative and especially stunning. For example, the images The Phenomenology of Ripples (left) The Old Saguaro (see above) , and Beauty and the Brain (see above) are examples. Which comes first – image or concept? You find the image and then write the commentary? Or are you thinking about some phenomena or concept classified as “science” and you go looking for an image to illustrate it?
LM: Sometimes the science commentary comes after the image, but other times there is interaction between scene selection and scientific commentary. I am not able to distinguish visual science from visual art.
SAN: What are your plans for the near future regarding your art photography?
LM: I am a rather poor planner, but in general I hope to continue to grow as an artist, perhaps produce great work, and continue to be able to reflect my experiences in creative ways. I believe that I have a long way to go, and, oh the places I’ll go!
Larry Mayer's public posts on Google +: https://plus.google.com/+LarryMayer/posts
LM: Google+ is an ongoing experiment for me where, among other motivations, I wanted to understand to whom my photography might appeal. I’ve posted a variety of images and now believe that my work is of very limited general appeal, but strongly appeals to a very, very small niche group. Also, I don’t want to spend time being a webmaster.
SAN: Your postings in Google + under the hashtag #sciencesunday have been both very informative and especially stunning. For example, the images The Phenomenology of Ripples (left) The Old Saguaro (see above) , and Beauty and the Brain (see above) are examples. Which comes first – image or concept? You find the image and then write the commentary? Or are you thinking about some phenomena or concept classified as “science” and you go looking for an image to illustrate it?
LM: Sometimes the science commentary comes after the image, but other times there is interaction between scene selection and scientific commentary. I am not able to distinguish visual science from visual art.
SAN: What are your plans for the near future regarding your art photography?
LM: I am a rather poor planner, but in general I hope to continue to grow as an artist, perhaps produce great work, and continue to be able to reflect my experiences in creative ways. I believe that I have a long way to go, and, oh the places I’ll go!
Larry Mayer's public posts on Google +: https://plus.google.com/+LarryMayer/posts
