"zShortLife"
Self Portrait by Gerry Zeck.

How long have you been creating?

I was an explorer as a child; one of those kids who were always running away just to see what was on the other side of the tracks. Early themes of my drawings centered around those things I encountered while roaming thru the Veterans Administration grounds in Milwaukee: Guinnea Pigs, lakes, streams and transients huddled around camp fires.

Dedication to the art of photography started for me in the 1960ıs. Selling my first few photographs to Good Photography and Salon Photography magazines fueled my subsequent obsession to make my work public.

"ThereThen"
Scene from the Easter Love-In at Elysian Park, Los Angeles, 1968.

What is your media of choice?

Photography is my medium of choice. Black and white marked my original love affair with photography. As staff cartographer at UCLA, I worked with high contrast copy film. A fine darkroom with a spare Hassleblad camera was all I needed to launch my exploration of B&W continuous tone film.

Magazine photography became a favorite variety of commercial work for me because it paid well and gave me access to places, people and activities that I might never have witnessed otherwise. When I didnıt have assignments on my editorial or advertising schedule, I promoted photo essays on a variety of subjects to magazine editors.

Around ten or twelve years ago I became terribly impressed by Jerry Uelsmannıs surrealistic photo collages. As much as I loved the magic of darkroom work, I traded my darkroom for a Power Mac and Photoshop at that time. I have been generating photo collages through Photoshop ever since.

"PumaSkyLily Mandala"
My favorite model and my first computer generated photocollage (1994).

What are your motivations for creating?

I am merely obeying the human need to make my marks, to write on the walls of the cave. I choose to write with light, to stop the fast moving world and to study it more closely through still photography.

Photography as a window and a mirror I started recording images of friends and the beauty around me, in landscapes and in people; I am ever seeking the erotic elements of light and form that stir the soul.

I have tended to work in cycles of interest and feasibiliy, around self-designed themes and/or technical problems. In the 60ıs I concentrated on people and their activities. Urban places and street photography were big on my plate during the 70ıs. Late 70ıs and early 80ıs produced landscapes and more nudes. During the middle 80ıs and 90ıs, my commercial photography years, saw the production of personal work fall off considerably.

Semi-retired, I am able to return to my personal art work now. And it feels as if Iım starting my art work all over again. The world is still my oyster and the erotic remains my pearl. A challenging motivation is to make pictures that speak and listen.

"Draperies"
I favor soft eyed imagery when it invites the viewer to see beyond what is apparent and leaves room for the viewerıs imagination and non-visual senses.

What other artists or movements inform your work?

During the 60ıs I devoured photo magazines and books studying the work of world class photographers. Cartier Bresson was the first photographer who knocked my socks off. Time, Light, and People became conscious themes informing my work. I also met the work of Andre Kertesz and Edward Weston who took the ordinary and elevated it into higher realms of beauty.

When I realized that these men practiced photography as if it were a religion, I knew that I must do the same. Since then, photography has been a personal tool directed toward gnosis. I tend to think of art as a verb first and a noun second. I practice photography to regenerate my interest and participation in this brief lifetime.

In the late 60ıs, I was enrolled in the Ethnocinematography program at UCLA. It was then that I ran into the work of Richard Boleslavsky. Although written for actors his book, Acting: The First Six Lessons, contains jewels of wisdom for all young artists and his attitudes have influenced me greatly.

I rely on exhibits, web sites, and museums for inspiration. The quantity of beautiful art works available for viewing on the web is mind-numbing. Although my appreciation for art is catholic, Van Gogh and Dali are my favorite painters. My favorite contemporary photographer is Sebastiao Salgado; his work and his vision are awsome, potent, and humbling.

"Kernaling"
Major life passages seem to bring on the Phoenix syndrome wherein we are forced to discard old and less useful thoughts and perceptions of the world and arise to the new.

What do you find visually stimulating right now?

My wifeıs face. Touring European art museums. Viewing the great variety of work presented on EBSQart. My cat returning home after a night of hunting. The blue-green waters and white sand of the Gulf of Mexico. Pale tourists walking the winter beaches here in Sarasota. My wife at poolside.

"The Gene Pool"
A portrait of my wife during her chemotherapy days.

What's the last book you read?

Philip Roth, Operation Shylock A Confession. Roth is an intriguing writer, an astute observor of the human mind and the American scene. Reading one page of his writing can be like performing at the Olympics of mental gymnastics.

I support the our public libraryıs for sale books; most of my Philip Roth collection comes from there. They offer cheap reading of classic materials and I always go there with the belief that I will run into something unexpected, alluring, and informative. I am seldom disappointed.

Do you think your past work as a freelance photographer and cartographer has influenced your current art?

Definitely. Both map-making and photography evolved almost simultaneously for me. I learned to pay critical attention to detail and developed interpretive and inking skills with cartographic work. I use those same skills when I choose to frame a photograph, decide when to release the shutter, or lay down a bezier line in Photoshop.

I bought my first 35mm camera at the camp PX in Okinawa where, as a 17 year old, I was working as a topographic draftsman for the Marine Corps. Thereafter, I photographed physical and cultural landscapes in Okinawa, The Philippines, and in Japan.

My first art photo exhibition was held at Newhouse School of Journalism at Syracuse University in 1972. At the time, I taught courses in Cartography and Photography for Social Scientists in the Geography Department there.

For six years (1997-2003), I contracted to produce nautical charts for a major Florida chart publisher. I used Photoshop, Illustrator and a couple of other programs to update scanned NOAA charts. Techniques that I learned producing nautical charts in Photoshop were often times applied to my personal work.

Geographers are trained to plot data on maps and to interpret patterns that evolve. I still rely on analogies between the disciplines in order to push my understanding of each. Both can teach us ³where we are² and point in the direction of ³where we might be going² in both physical and in psychological space.

"Cross Roads III"
A recent computer generated photocollage by Gerry Zeck.

What would you like your fellow EBSQ artists and our collectors to know about you and/or your work?

I am a Gnostic and a seeker. I believe the Art of Photography has the potential to lead one deeper into self discovery and beyond. These beliefs guide my art work.

I also believe in metaphors! These days I see myself standing at a Cross Road on a metaphoric map in a metaphoric world. I mark this cross road with the digital collage, above.

The Cross relates time to place. In picture space, the horizontal images speak of impending birth, the possibilities of rebirth, and sources of succor or nourishment. The collage combines images from my distant past, when children were being born, and from the relatively recent past, when old images were being viewed and manipulated anew. The images speak to me of human fecundity. Life presenting believers with unlimited possibilities.

The vertical images represent the rise and fall of thoughts and souls from institutional beliefs (formalized on the Cistine Chapel ceiling), through the creative womb, to the transcendent angels or muses, and back down again.

Life is good, but life is short. To see more of my work, from the ridiculous to the sublime, please visit at the sites below.

Thank you,

Gerry Zeck