Merg Ross and Austin Granger

From March 9 to April 7, Viewpoint will feature two artists whose many differences are bridged by their commitment to individual vision expressed in classic black-and-white silver prints.

Since his childhood spent in the company of some of California’s most celebrated photographers, Merg Ross has been refining his singular vision for over five decades. Austin Granger, on the other hand, is a younger artist who turned to photography after studying philosophy in college.

The images in Merg Ross’s exhibit, Beyond Casual Vision, were made between 1953 and 2006. “My fascination with abstraction is evident in my earliest work and continues to the present day,” he observes. “Before you are glimpses of the commonplace, perhaps not initially perceived, but existing beyond casual vision.”

While he could still count his age on two hands, Merg Ross was joining his father, San Francisco photographer Donald Ross, on visits to family friend Edward Weston in Carmel. “Edward would show each of his 8x10 contact prints and by the age of ten I had probably seen more Weston prints than many curators in the world,’ Ross recalls. “Those visits with Edward are what triggered my passion for photography’. Later, Ross accompanied his father and Brett Weston on camping trips. At 13, he was invited to participate in a group exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art. As an adult, Ross was a freelance commercial photographer until the early 1980s, when he quit commercial work to pursue fine art photography exclusively.

Ross’s work has been published and exhibited widely, both in the U.S. and abroad, and is in numerous public and private collections. Merg and his wife live in Oakland.

After completing a degree in Philosophy and Religious Thought at UC Santa Cruz, Austin Granger began to sense that “living in one’s mind can result in the feeling that though one walks through life, it is but lightly, as if on stilts.” He turned to photography as a way “to attempt to re-consummate a relationship with a world that often seems to have left me.”

“It has been said that the ‘Fall’ is a fall into forgetfulness. But what is it that we forget? We forget that the world is a place of precious things. We forget that this preciousness has more to do with our way of seeing than with the things themselves. The whole world is charged with grandeur. We forget to look with wonder.”

“Photography is my attempt to remember,” Granger explains. “It is an attempt to stand toe to toe with my life … and embrace it.”

Granger’s work has been exhibited in several West Coast venues, and has been featured in B&W and Emulsion magazines. Austin, his wife, and their three young children recently relocated from California to Astoria, Oregon.

For more about Granger and his work, visit www.austingranger.com.