Pedro Meyer: Heresies

September 2008 – October 13, 2008

ABOUT THE EXHIBIT

Pedro Meyer’s Heresies is a retrospective comprising four decades of groundbreaking work by one of the world’s most innovative photographers. The Heresies exhibit — opening simultaneously in 60 museums worldwide in October 2008 — will also create a revolutionary new paradigm for exhibiting photographs in museums. 

Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer is as renowned for his powerful and provocative photographs as he is for his pioneering work with digital imaging. Meyer’s photographs consistently test the limits of truth, fiction and reality. With the advent of digital photography in the early 1990s, Meyer evolved from a documentary photographer who created so-called “straight photographs” into a digital-documentarian who often combines photographic elements from disparate times and places to arrive at a different or higher truth. Meyer’s oft- expressed contention that all photographs — digitally manipulated or not — are equally “true” and “untrue” has been labeled “heretical” in the orthodox documentary photography community. Hence the title Heresies. 

Meyer’s personal innovations in the field of digital photography include creating the first CD- ROM to combine sound and images, creating the first digital prints ever made and in 1994, creating his renowned online photography forum, zonezero.com — the most-visited digital photography content site on the web.

In addition to these artistic and technical contributions, Meyer’s trailblazing work on behalf of Latin American photographers, beginning with his establishment of the Mexican Council of Photography in the late 1970s, effectively organized and elevated photography as an art form across an entire continent. 

With Heresies, Meyer casts his visionary gaze toward the concept of museum-based photography exhibits. What are they now? What can they be in the future? In an era of financial constraint and basic redefinition of the museum’s role, Meyer’s new... and heretical... paradigm for photography exhibits facilitates: 

• collaborative creativity between curator and artist 
• worldwide networking amongst the 60 museums participating in the Heresies program 
• enhanced research and collection-building capacity for museums, and 
• compelling educational programs that appeal to the iPod generation 

(pedromeyer.com)

FEATURED ARTIST
Pedro Meyer