I am proud of my Borscht Belt sense of humour and my queer eye.

Introduction

Meryl Meisler has been a photographer all her adult life, capturing the people, places, and moments where she lived, worked, and found belonging. These images, born of personal experience, have, in hindsight, become fragments of history – settling like particles in the sediment of yesterday. It was only after her retirement from teaching that she began to sift through this vast archive, unearthing stories of family and community. From these, she has crafted exhibitions and books that evoke the texture of the late twentieth century – the way we were.

Photographs of the recent past, those of living memory, possess a unique magic. For those who lived through these times, the images resonate in unexpected ways; an echo that will not entirely align with the present. Like complex jazz chords, they carry a subtle tension – a harmony that never quite resolves. In them, we discover resilience woven through humour, joy that defies adversity, and a hedonism teetering on the brink of loss. Photographs capture what we once knew, what we once felt. While memory smooths the details, photographs hold a texture that gives them traction, rubbing up against the imagination in ways that may surprise us. And for those too young to remember, these photographs offer the particular fascination of a world just beyond reach – the youthful lives of a parental generation, familiar yet distant. In these frozen moments, style transforms into nostalgia, detached from its original context – a golden age of retro.

Meryl Meisler’s photographs are not only entertaining; they offer a deeper insight into the way the world shifts and changes. It may be, as L.P. Hartley suggested, that the past is a foreign country where things are done differently. But before long, our present will become someone else’s past. In holding a mirror to the recent past, reminding us of where we came from, these images reveal just how swiftly change can come. Nothing stays the same, yet the way we evolve – whether consciously or not – is something we create, together.

Alasdair Foster

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Interview

Some of your earliest photographs were made with your family and their Mystery Club friends. How did that begin?

In my first Photo 101 course at university, the professor showed us the playful family photographs Jacques Henri Lartigue taken when he was a child. Lartigue grew up at the beginning of the twentieth century in a well-to-do Parisian family. His photographs show them in their fashionable attire goofing around and having fun together. It made me want to photograph my close-knit middle-class Jewish family and their friends, people I knew, played with, laughed with… people I loved and who loved me.

Like Lartigue’s family, the people close to me were very funny. My parents, Sunny and Jack, were members of The Mystery Club. It had been formed around 1960 and consisted of eleven couples that lived near each other, loved life, and were open to meeting people from different backgrounds. They knew how to have a good time. Every two months, on a Saturday night, they would meet at some predetermined location and go on a Mystery evening. They explored haunted houses, had seances, toured a nudist colony, took painting and cooking classes, went to a gay-male bath house to watch a soon-to-be-famous singer perform, and more… The members of the Mystery Club were like an extended family; I had to photograph them.

There is a lot of humour in these works, almost a kind of affectionate collective self-parody by those involved.

I photographed my family, neighbours, and friends in their homes. The domestic spaces became scenery, and the candid, unplanned action happened naturally. Laughingly, I sometimes told them that I was photographing Jewish American Princesses and their families. I do wonder if people who belong to communities that have been systematically oppressed for centuries tend to develop a powerful sense of humour, a survival mechanism that runs through their DNA.

You can see it in this photo [above right]. That’s my mother, Sunny Meisler, getting her hair done at Besame Beauty Salon in North Massapequa – June 1976. Mom’s weekly luxury ritual was going to the beauty parlour. There, she would relax, gossip, and laugh with the stylists and neighbours while getting her hair and nails done. Mom and the hairdressers didn’t hesitate when I asked to photograph her time at the salon; they all had tremendous senses of humour.

I love this shot [above right]. How did it come about?

That is a Mystery Club family. We had been photographing in the living room and then they suggested the bathroom. They came up with the idea for one of the sons to change into a bathrobe and shave while his mom blew his hair. Meanwhile, the father washed his feet in the basin and the other brother looked on from the shower stall. It was like improvisational theatre, where the performers direct the action. Looking back, I see that my intention then – as now – is to photograph people expressing humour and joy.

I am proud of my Borscht Belt sense of humour and my queer eye.

Many of these images were made when the LGBTQ+ community was becoming more open.

I was attending my High School graduation and senior prom while the Stonewall riots were taking place less than an hour’s drive away. I came out as a lesbian in April 1975 and moved to New York that September. I fell in love with the beautifully diverse city, and that love has never waned. It was the right time and place for a young queer Jewish female artist in search of a welcoming community, looking to carve her path in life and contribute to society.

By day, I worked as a freelance illustrator while, at night, I immersed myself in the vivid nightlife – the discos and go-go bars and burgeoning LGBTQ+ community – documenting everything around me. Then and now, that’s my approach: I don’t go out to photograph; I photograph where I go. However, when I go to photograph contemporary nightlife now, I do so with the primary intention of photographing and seeing the performances. During the seventies, my primary intention was to go out. Fortunately, I often brought along my camera and photographed what I saw.

What was it like in New York City in the 1970s?

The city was in a financial crisis. To many, it was a dangerous and scary place to be avoided. But I found New York wonderfully diverse – I still do. It teems with people from all walks of life and countries of origin – different ethnicities, religions, sexual and gender identities. They come to New York to plug into and add to its energy. The big change today is that it is so much more expensive to live here.

How did your unique body of work on the Bushwick area of Brooklyn begin?

In December 1981, I began teaching at Intermediate School 291 in Bushwick. The neighbourhood was struggling, burnt out; many blocks looked like the aftermath war. I was scared to carry my medium format camera to work for fear of being robbed. (I had already been robbed by an intruder on the last day of school the previous June). But, by the following February, I could no longer resist photographing what I saw: kids being kids and people getting on with life amid the rubble.

While much of your work in in black-and-white, these Bushwick photographs are in colour. What led to that choice?

Working full-time as a teacher, I didn’t have the necessary time or budget to develop film and print in the darkroom. My girlfriend Patricia gave me an inexpensive point-and-shoot camera, which was less likely to attract the wrong kind of attention. I loaded the camera with colour-transparency film and photographed what I found interesting on my walk to and from school, and sometimes through the classroom window.

I taught in Bushwick for thirteen years. In 1989, Patricia moved from San Francisco to New York and we began our life together. By then, I had less time and interest in going out clubbing. Little did I know that these snapshots would become the most extensive known documentation of Bushwick in the eighties and early nineties made by a single photographer. And it was all done on an inexpensive point-and-shoot camera. As they say: the best camera is the one you have on you.

How did your first book ‘A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick’ come about?

I retired from my full-time job as a public-school teacher in 2010. That has allowed me to focus on my artwork. My eighties Bushwick photos started getting a lot of positive press and, in 2012, the writer Vanessa Mártir and I presented a collaborative exhibition, ‘Defying Devastation Bushwick in the 1980s’. During the show, a stranger with a French accent told me he recently moved to Bushwick and loved my work. That was it until the following year Vanessa and I took a lunch break at a new place called Bizarre. At the door, the same French man welcomed us. His name was Jean–Stéphane Sauvaire, a filmmaker now based in the area, and this was his place. He said he wanted to show work like mine in the bar’s basement area. Over lunch, I laughed to Vanessa: “I’ve exhibited in museums and galleries. This guy wants me to show in the basement of a burlesque drag bar in Bushwick?” To which Vanessa replied: “Don’t be such a snob.”

I revisited Bizarre at night; it was pulsating, filled with people dancing to great music. Glitter balls everywhere. It was a revelation – Bushwick was now the place to be! OMG – it hit me, my Bushwick and disco photos belonged together. I’d never shown my disco work anywhere before. Bizarre was the perfect place to bring the two bodies of work together. I found Jean–Stéphane: “Do you still want to show my work?” To which he replied: “Of course, it’s history.”

When, a few months later, Jean–Stéphane announced he wanted to publish my Bushwick images in a book, I suggested we present them alongside my previously unpublished disco images. The book was came out in 2014, it went viral!

The following year Jean–Stéphane published ‘Paradise & Purgatory: Sassy ’70s Suburbia & the City’ which brings together my Long Island family photos with early New York street scenes. In it, I wanted to show the way in which my burnt-out Bushwick work revealed a sense of humour in the face of tough times. And I wanted to show who I was and where I came from. So, I searched through the pictures of my Long Island family and their friends, juxtaposing them with the street life in the city. It’s a coming-of-age story reflecting my early childhood encounters with anti-Semitism, growing up and coming out, my passions and the search for purpose as a responsible member of society.

But this was only the tip of the iceberg. In 2019, Jean-Stéphane closed Bizarre to focus on his film projects. Although he would no longer be publishing my work, he volunteered to help me edit the next book, ‘New York Paradise Lost, Bushwick Era Disco’, which explored the grittier side of nightlife and school life in Bushwick. Later, a new social-media friend called Shin Noguchi introduced my work to the Bologna-based publisher, Eyeshot. The result was ‘Street Walker’, which brings together iconic images from the US cultural hotspots of the seventies and eighties: New York City, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Miami Beach, and, of course, Fire Island.

When did you first discover Fire Island?

Flashback August 4, 1962: My mates at Girl Scout Camp Edey in Bayport, Long Island, began whispering about a place out in the ocean called Fire Island where naked fairies lived in little houses with cute names like Shirley Temple…

Summer 1977: a trans friend named Alexa introduced me to a Manhattan beautician called Barnett who invited me for a weekend at Survivor, his Fire Island beach house. I hadn’t known what to expect and, when I first arrived, I was completely and very pleasantly stunned. The wild beach scenes that greeted me awoke that dormant childhood memory of a land of naked fairies… Then and now, Fire Island is the playground of the city’s LGBTQ+ community and their friends. It was in sharp contrast to the straight Long Island suburbia in which I had grown up. For the next three years I made frequent summer getaways to Chery Grove and the Pines, documenting my time there.

People look very relaxed about being photographed.

I photograph communities to which I feel a connection and empathy. I want to capture people exuding pride and joy in who they are, which means they are usually happy to be photographed.

Do you have other books in the pipeline?

In recent years, I’ve returned to photographing contemporary nightlife. In ‘Nightlife Becomes Them’ I want to create a book that juxtaposes the seventies clubs I frequented with the nocturnal party culture I currently have the privilege of exploring.

My largest body of unseen work – ‘A Pedagogue’s Photographs’ – is an insider’s point of view of the K-12 schools in New York City. There are things you see in schools that are unlike anything in the outside world… handmade notices created by teachers; gum stuck in the oddest places…

Making books is intensive, but I love how it forces you to edit and contextualise your life’s work; to study it closely. And I enjoying working with collaborators, editors, and publishers on this process. Books propel your work into the universe, reaching out to new and diverse audiences.

Looking back over your photographic career, what have you learned?

Photography has taught me that patience, persistence, honesty, integrity, and learning to work with others pays off in the long run. Like life itself, you take a lot of crap, but among it all, there are raw gems to be discovered and polished up to shine for all to see. Time and distance help with editing – photographs get better with age.

For me, taking photographs is like a shot of serotonin. It lifts my spirits. The most important thing photography has taught me is that health and wellbeing come first.

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In 2021, Meryl Meisler was honoured with the Center for Photography at Woodstock Affinity Award. She is included among the Hundred Heroines and was named by TIME magazine as one of the unsung American female photographers of the past century. Her work is held in a number of public and private collections including the American Jewish Congress (New York, NY); the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, France); the Center for Photography at Woodstock (Kingston, NY); Columbia University (New York, NY); and the Library of Congress (Washington, DC).

Her photographs have featured in four monographs: ‘A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick’ (Bizarre 2014); ‘Purgatory & Paradise: Sassy ’70s Suburbia & The City’ (Bizarre 2015); ‘New York Paradise Lost: Bushwick Era Disco’ (Parallel Pictures Press 2021); and ‘Street Walker’ (Eyeshot, Italy 2024). She lives with her wife, the artist Patricia Jean O’Brien, working between New York City and Woodstock, NY.

Photo [detail]: Kevin Frest

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This interview is a Talking Pictures original.

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