In A Blink Of The Eye – A Resume Of Sorts for Michael Maersch I can’t believe I’ve been doing this for over twenty years now. All the miles, all those pictures, all the wacky stories, people, schedules, adventures. Traveling throughout the west, eyes-open to the heart of America just across the tracks and off solitary highways only locals and truckers drive, I see old homesteads vanishing; like bleached cows' bones, each season less and less remains of 'Anttie Em's farm'. Sorry Dorothy. But still there are quirky little towns off the beaten path and weather-weary billboards leaning bow-legged in cornfields. Each summer driving back to Wisconsin from my home here in Arizona I find jewels scattered along my path. What a wonderful life, helping filmmakers and photographers locate their perfect road, a more breathtaking landscape, the right “funk” when I’m asked to come up with a “funky old bar”; what a kick to be hired specifically by some clients to, in a sense, collaborate on their projects. The summer of 1991 I had the opportunity to work on a film being made in Denmark because I was able to understand the essence of what the filmmakers were intent on having to work with in order to best tell their story. The production designer, a life-long resident of Copenhagen, shook his head one day as we were reviewing my latest finds and said, “I have lived here my entire life, walked past these apartments and alleys a thousand times and never saw this until you hand me these pictures! Perhaps it is best to have someone who doesn’t live here look with a fresh eye…” Maybe so, but each time I drive more familiar roads out west here there is always something new I was too busy with other thoughts to notice the last time I passed by. I believe instead, it is within the process of collaborating with someone that I am provided a new set of lenses through which to see the familiar – through their ideas, at this time, this day. I sort of stumbled into becoming a location scout by having started out as a photographers' assistant back in 1982. I was working with various shooters here locally in Phoenix trying to learn enough to enable myself to build a book that I would feel comfortable showing anyone, in any marketplace. One day I met Susan Volk who was in the studio styling a project I was assisting on. She needed someone to help her out on an upcoming television commercial she was booked to do art direction for. I found the production of moving-pictures absolutely fascinating: the scale, the attention to detail – most importantly to me, the profoundly different use of |
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