Michael Maersch is an artist, photographer and designer.
Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg's early photo-transfer lithographs and screen prints he jumped at an opportunity to work in the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee's darkroom making large format transparencies for fellow printmakers in the Art program there. By way of experimentation with the Department's massive copy camera and an unlimited supply of litho film he produced a series of abstract, almost-Rorschach-like silkscreen prints between 1973 and 1976 distilled from selections of an extensive, young man's obsession-with and collection of girlie-magazines.
After graduation at the university he invested in a Yashica 35mm SLR camera, along with several inexpensive after-market lenses and began shooting what he saw through the viewfinder: 'flat' abstractions – details of the industrial city he lived in (Milwaukee), things-new he saw while traveling in south Florida and the first bits of a life-long series of shop windows: Their reflections and collections of food, fashion, knick-knacks and such.
In 1984 Michael Maersch began to provide 'location scouting' services to filmmakers and photographers, an opportunity he landed while assisting commercial photographers in Arizona as a freelance indentured servant. He has designed all but his initial (company's) websites – locationswest.com, consistently rejecting the whiz-bang glitz of Flash-generated content for the most-basic of animated elements used sparingly to guide visitors through his online presentations. Though assured of the utmost importance to engage and seduce the viewer with a visual sirens' song (after all, we are living in the world of 'web_v2' these days) he strives to hold to the wisdom of 'K-I-S-S' (Keep it simple, stupid)!
Today his photo illustrations are generated in a dry darkroom – his office workstation – utilizing computer, software and ink-jet printer instead of a 4x5 enlarger and wet, smelly chemicals that used-to chew-up layers of skin on his fingertips. (He never was a 'tong'-kinda-guy in the darkroom. You know, 'fingers were made before forks'.) Michael Maersch has been working in Photoshop since Version 4 and has incorporated Adobe's Lightroom application as an integral starting point in his personal and location scouting projects since its introduction in 2007.
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