Bio

Neil Meyerhoff is a photographer with over 30 years experience, the last 15 years specializing in panoramic photography. During this time, he has studied with Sally Mann, Alex Webb, Larry Fink, Jay Maisel, Harvey Stein, among others.

Neil's photographs are in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, California; Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland; New York Historical Society; New York Public Library; and the Cleveland Clinic. His corporate clients include Johns Hopkins Hospital, Fidelity Investments, Becton Dickinson, and the Maryland Stadium Authority.

Neil is currently represented by C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore, and Panoramic Images in Chicago. His photographs have recently been shown in New York, Miami, and Baltimore.

Reviews

"Neil Meyerhoff's recent pictures from India, easily rank among the most compelling images this globe-trotting artist has made.

During previous excursions abroad, Meyerhoff.. used a miniature panoramic camera that produces eye-popping images with an extreme wide-angle view.

In the Indian pictures, however, Meyerhoff seems to have achieved a breakthrough of sorts, both technically and in an enlarged vision of humanity.

The panoramic format usually associated with landscape photography is put to use recording portraits characterized by great emotional sensitivity and technical finesse.

By turning the camera on its side - transforming its wide, skinny horizontal frame into a slender, elongated vertical - Meyerhoff was able to make individual portraits of people that are as visually spacious as a panoramic shot of earth and sky, yet feel as intimately connected to their subjects as a close-up.

The pictures, which were taken in various Indian cities, are also notable for the startling color harmonies Meyerhoff was able to capture, which remind one o scenes by the great Indian photographer Raghubir Singh.

Meyerhoff seems to have taken his cue from the master in pictures like Festival on the Ganges, Varanasi, a crowded scene depicting hundreds of worshipers who have gathered to bathe in the sacred river.

The picture, one of the show's relatively few horizontal images, is a riot of vivid reds, blues, pinks, greens and yellows.

Yet the colors, arrayed across scores of figures on the river bank and in the water, never compete for attention. Rather, they manage to balance each other with the aplomb of a Venetian banquet scene by Veronese.

In these pictures, Meyerhoff has brought a new level of technical and emotional maturity to his art. They are wonderful travel photographs that also transcend their genre and suggest the deeper truths of the lives they record."
Baltimore Sun, January 17, 2007

"What is striking is the extent to which he (Meyerhoff) pushes the envelope in terms of both photographic format and subject matter...His crisply defined, colorful portraits and urban landscapes give a strong sense of Indian society.

"Besides his customary panoramic shots, Meyerhoff has a number of less expected shots that adopt a narrow vertical format. That tall and narrow framing also proves to be appropriate for portraits in which personalities and occupations are emphasized. Many of these single portraits feature women whose beautifully colored clothing is matched by the directness with which they face the camera."
Owings Mills Times, January 25, 2007

"Attracted to vibrant colors, interesting architecture and cultures where 'life is still lived out in the open,' Neil Meyerhoff's photography, over the years, has taken him from the streets of Cuba and India to the temples of Vietnam to China to Laos, Russia, and many of the great cities in Europe. In each of these places...wandering the streets from the first light of morning until the long shadow of evening descends, he follows his eye looking for vibrancy, color, culture, or a brief moment of human interaction. His panoramic images convey an immediacy of action-that fleeting moment when forms and colors align into some form of harmony."

"As a solitary monk mindfully sweeps a garden pathway, the photographer seems to become transparent, perhaps transported, and receptive, allowing the sense of that particular place and time to resonate through his images. The extended format of his images furthers this sense, drawing viewers in as if we too had been there in that instant."

In many of his 'environmental portraits' the subjects, often set slightly back in the frame and seen in full at eye level, stare back at us with thoughtful, questioning eyes. And while they each oblige the photographer in his wish to photograph them...they are still guarded, engaging and communicating with the photographer --- yet not fully trusting. This subtle tension between openness and reserve lend the subjects an air of dignity and mystery."

[Meyerhoff] "is driven to visually explore and discover; his aesthetic is that 'a photographer has to work the streets to get a feel of what will happen next.' While he acknowledges that by their nature his images are on some level social documents he does not feel that they hold any deeper significance: 'In my case, there is not any social or political meaning beyond the image itself, other than that the photographs express how people interacted in public at a certain time and place.' And a major part of that public interaction was Meyerhoff himself: the friendly, perhaps curious foreigner wandering the side streets with a camera in hand and an eye for a true human moment and, of course, color."
Excerpted from "Camera Arts" magazine, August/September 2005 © Alethea Monk

"Neil Meyerhoff's panoramas are resonant in color and detail. They create structures that are at once formal and dynamic, where color and light reveal an emotional hue that pulses with a rhythm of life both exotic and inviting. Meyerhoff's vertical portraits convey a richness of information that speaks volumes. The pictures admirably carry on an often overlooked but fascinating tradition in photography."
Stephen Perloff, The Photo Review, November 2004

"There's a playful curiosity and wry pictorial elegance in Neil Meyerhoff's extreme wide-angle street photographs of Cuba, China, and Japan...His compositions embody an alert spontaneity and formal ingenuity that often enable him to capture two or three separate incidents within a single frame...The results are striking arrangements of line, color, and mood that convey a powerful sense of place and make extended looking an almost visceral pleasure."
Art News, April 2003

"In his best pictures, Meyerhoff's gentle vision does more than simply skim the surface of his subjects; there's a playful curiosity in his work and also a certain formal elegance that harks back to a long history of picture making in far away places."
Baltimore Sun, January 20, 2003

"Meyerhoff's photographs capture the atmospheric color and tropical patina of life in the old city of Havana with affection, wit and a formal elegance that attest to the survival of an irrepressible spirit among the Cuban people today."
Baltimore Sun, January 16, 2001

"Meyerhoff's 'Photographs from Four Continents' remind his audience of the artist's strengths and versatility. Meyerhoff idealizes what he sees, whether the subject is architecture, wildlife or landscape. Surely zebra's never looked more zebra like in 'Zebras in a pool,' and this ability to capture the essence of the subject requires a sacrifice of artistic ego"
Baltimore Sun January 12, 1999

"Meyerhoff's panoramic photographs...are notable for color, for a clarity of image which gives a crispness and immediacy even to objects at a distance, and for a compositional integrity which rescues them from being simply long pictures."
Baltimore Sun, June 15, 1993