Brian Merrett

Brian Merrett is a Montreal-based fine-arts, architectural and travel photographer. He was born in Saint John, New Brunswick in the Canadian Maritimes, in 1945 and has lived in the Montreal area since. After apprenticeship in the mid '60s as an engineering and architectural draftsman, he photographed industrial installations for his employer while pursuing correspondence studies in photography. He also began photographing in the documentary idiom of the time.In the late ‘60s Merrett apprenticed with Lennart Koraen, owner of a small commercial studio and began his photographic career. Influenced by both his father, John Campbell Merrett, an architect and town planner, and his father-in-law, John Russell Harper, an art historian, in 1969 he was commissioned to document the restoration of the 19th-century Head Office of the Bank of Montreal and, consecutively found contract employment with the National Gallery of Canada. From 1983 to 2001 Merrett was the senior staff photographer at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and he continues to do contract fine-art reproduction there and within the arts community.

Merrett's work with environmental and urban groups such as STOP and Héritage Montreal (on whose board he served from 1975 to 1980) led to a number of photographic essays and publications. In 1986 and 1990 Merrett co-authored two books on Montreal architecture with architectural historian François Rémillard. The second, Montreal Architecture, A Guide to Styles and Buildings, was re-launched in the fall of 2007 and it reached the non-fiction best-seller lists in Montreal the following spring (visit [http://www.archiguides.com] ).

Merrett has held numerous exhibitions of his travel photography and his image essays dealing with the relationship of ecology and theology. His work can be seen on-line at [http://www.merrettimages.ca]