Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Moments in musicality
Art Meripol’s concert portraits are subjects of new exhibit
When Art Meripol reflects on his all-time favorites among the concert photos he has snapped, four legends come to mind — Stevie Ray Vaughan, Tina Turner, B.B. King and Willie Nelson.
Meripol’s photos, shot during his days at the Arkansas Gazette from 1983-89, will be shown Friday through Dec. 8 at the Old State House Museum. He plans to be at the opening night of “Music in Focus: The Lens of Art Meripol.”
The show will include 50 of his concert photos, with about half of them taken at Barton Coliseum.
Meripol says he always looked for two things when he was shooting concert photos.
“One was where the artist would be looking back at the lens so that their eyes were coming down right into my eyes because I knew in a captured photo like that, they would be looking right back at the viewer and that created that connection.
“The other thing I really liked was to capture somebody when it looked like they were listening to their music — they were lost in the music,” he adds.
At his home in Birmingham, Ala., he has a large print of his photo of Tina Turner hanging in his family room. “Wherever you walk in the room, her eyes are following you.”
He shot that photo at Turner’s Private Dancer Tour at Barton Coliseum in October 1985. Meripol had 10 minutes to capture the shot he wanted. At that time, record labels only allowed photographers to shoot artists early in their performance — before they get hot and sweaty.
Turner was dancing and bouncing all over the stage as Meripol tried to get the shot he wanted using a long telephoto lens. He shot
five or six rolls of film — this was long before the advent of digital photography — and only captured one shot he was pleased with.
“It was the one that I wanted and people just look at it and they just go crazy over it,” he says.
A BACKLIT B.B. KING
Meripol has photographed B.B. King a number of times. At one particular concert, Meripol was looking for something different.
“I was leaving frustrated because I still had not shot anything that didn’t look like something everybody else had shot. As I was leaving out through a little side door behind the stage, I looked back and caught this moment where he was backlit and there was no detail. It’s just the outline of him, but you know who it is instantly.
“That’s one of my absolute favorites because it was something no one else had shot,” he says. “It was really different.”
He likes his photo of Stevie Ray Vaughan because he says the musician was lost in his music. That photo was licensed as the cover of “Texas Flood — The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan.”
“They weren’t really clear on how they found my picture … but they thought this is it. This is what they were looking for,” he says. “They contacted me and asked if I would be willing and of course, yeah!”
His image was licensed for both the hardback and softback versions of the book as well as the audio version and an Asian version.
‘ON MOUNT RUSHMORE’
His photo of Willie Nelson shows the musician with his trademark bandana, long hair and scruffy beard.
“He just looks like he ought to be on Mount Rushmore,” Meripol says.
Meripol worked with Arkansas Gazette reporter Kelley Bass to capture many concerts in Arkansas. Bass is now chief executive officer at the Arkansas Museum of Discovery.
“The amazing concert photography that people are going to see at the exhibit were all shot in the first six to nine minutes of the concert. He got so many great pictures when you consider that he had such a short amount of time to shoot,” says Bass, who helped arrange for the “Music in Focus: The Lens of Art Meripol” show.
“Art has amazing attention to detail in his photography. He also just has a great eye,” Bass adds. “I’ve always said taking a good picture is about seeing the picture, not taking the picture. Spotting what would be a good picture, then taking it versus the skill of actually snapping the shutter and having all of your dials at the right apertures and speeds and all that.
“It’s really about the vision. And his ability to see a good picture is better than anybody I’ve ever worked with.”
KODAK INSTAMATIC BEGINNINGS
Meripol grew up in a large family in Texas where he was a quiet middle child who wore hand-me-down clothes from an older brother. For his ninth birthday, he was given a Kodak Instamatic camera.
“I looked through that viewfinder and I made my decisions about the world — I am intellectualizing it now, that wasn’t what I was thinking then — but I realize now what it meant to me,” he says, adding he still has that camera.
In 1968, he was a paperboy for the Dallas Morning News when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. He remembers the paper arrived late that day.
“I opened it up and saw that picture on the front page and it just kind of chilled me to the bone and I recognized in some way how that moved me,” he says.
In high school in Texas, Meripol realized he wanted to be a photographer, but found that getting on the school’s yearbook staff was a popularity contest — and he didn’t make the cut.
But when his family moved to Fayetteville as his father took a new job, he enrolled in a journalism class. “My first day there, the teacher of the class put a camera in my hand and said ‘You are the photographer.’ I’ve never stopped doing that.”
HIRED IN 1983
He got a journalism degree at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. During his senior year, he also worked full time as a photographer at the Northwest Arkansas Times in Fayetteville. His photo career led him to newspapers in Texarkana and Port Arthur, Texas, before he was hired by the Arkansas Gazette in 1983.
He and Bass covered their first concert together that year. Wendy O. Williams opened for KISS in Pine Bluff.
“KISS was being picketed by a bunch of churchgoers because they were satanic, supposedly,” Meripol recalls. “People were protesting outside the arena and they had no idea who Wendy O. Williams was.” (Williams was a punk rocker who was noted for her onstage antics, which included partial nudity, exploding equipment and chainsaw guitars.)
Meripol, who turns 70 in July, left the Gazette in 1989 to become a photographer for Southern Living magazine. He retired in 2013 but still does occasional photography work.
“I’m tickled to death that it is going to be in Little Rock,” Meripol says of the forthcoming show. “Something I’ve always wanted to do was take it back to Arkansas, where I shot so many of the pictures and where I had some of my best shoots.”