HEAVYWEIGHTS 03 —MERRICK WINTER
MERRICK WINTER
Merrick Winter is a somewhat-globally-based Photographer, Videographer, and Musician, currently taking a hiatus from Instagram and social media. Like most Photographers Merrick’s work focused on People & Places, but his was always taken to new levels by how incorporating everything he knew, he would impressively direct and shoot but also compose to the soundtracks to the short films he made. I met Merrick a few years ago in London through Photography and mutual friends. What always drew me to him was his confidence and just how thoroughly he thought about everything as evidenced below.
— Below is a the conversation I had with Merrick in March 2017 at his old flat in Camberwell, London.
ntroduce yourself?
My name is Merrick Winter, I'm a Guitarist, Photographer and Videographer. I'm a student at King's College London, and I would describe myself as a bit of a third-culture kid. I grew up in the mid-west and I moved to the UK when I was about 11 years old.
Is there anything you do now that you want to do more of?
Yes. Definitely. As a student, especially if you've chosen your degree before you've aligned yourself with your priorities, i.e when you're 18 years old and just popping out of school, you'll find that at least in my personal experience, what you're doing for your degree will end up by the time it comes round to 3rd year not aligning with anything you are actually trying to pursue, especially if you're a multidisciplinary Creative. I chose a degree which purposefully allowed me to experiment. So I'm doing a liberal arts degree where I study English literature as a major and Film as a minor, and within that I can do a bunch of different creative fields. From Music to Philosophy to History. It certainly doesn't help to narrow down your field of view, but then as a multidisciplinary Creative I suppose that's a good thing. I would rather be doing Music. I would rather be giving 110% of my time to practising, writing, recording. But at the same time, Photography & Filmmaking is something that as a Creative in a city like London it's an invaluable skill for being able to sustain yourself. Everyone needs images, we live in an image culture and an image-commodity culture and I think it's really important. I get distracted easily from what I really want to be doing with my time.
What do you want to do when you graduate?
I want to work as a freelancer. I told myself after I did some time interning in New York, that the business and corporate world was not so much my forte. It was a fantastic experience, but it's certainly not something which I could see myself doing for an extended period of time, I love to travel too much. I love to play shows, I love preforming, so I'm trying to at the moment come up with an action plan which allows me to reconcile an entrepreneurial impotence without dedicating al of my time to office work. Trying to integrate my creativity into a business model, and that's very difficult when your time and efforts are spread between a number of different pursuits, but I think you have to look at it like it will align eventually and you just have to go with it and pursue as many avenues as you can until one or all of them are strong enough that you can sustain them. So what do I want to be after uni, I want to be an entrepreneur, I want to be a freelancer, I want to write my own music. But specific plans are hard to define when you're a Creative.
MERRICK — March 2017
HOME — March 2017
Would you say you're encouraged by your peers and friends?
Oh absolutely! It's an interesting thing, in the hyperactive social media culture I think you're very easily influenced and led away from your own vision, your own direction by consuming too much of other people's content. It's something I used to do quite a lot when I was younger, but I try to limit what I consume and surround myself with people who really inspire me, not just consuming their content. Some of the people I hang around with who play music, they're some of the most inspiring people I know because with music it's such a leap of faith, it's even more unstable than say, becoming a photographer. I like hanging out with people who go on a limb, who take chances, who follow their desires without any certainty. Who're willing to forgo “oh this probably isn't a safe bet, I'll just get a 9-5”. Those are the people who interest me, those are the people who I want to talk to. Instagram has been an amazing platform for learning about different styles of work and I've met some absolutely amazing people through it that I would never have come across otherwise, including yourself
What do you think your wardrobe says about you?
Bit of a scattered mind. I would say if you looked at my wardrobe chronologically, you would see someone trying to figure out who they are. When I was travelling that was an embarrassing period, I would sort of pick up different pieces of clothing from different places I'd visit, put it all together and by the end of it, god knows what I looked like, but I thought I looked cool. I didn't, definitely didn't. First year (of uni) I suppose I experimented with some leather jackets, that probably didn't work very well on me. I'd say now I'm muted colours, classic Londoner, a bit of the New Yorker style; all black. I quite like large shirts, patterns, short sleeves if possible although not living in London. I'm actually a big fan of watches, I like a good bit of chronology now and then. Honestly, I used to be quite vain, probably still am.
Is it something you've thought about?
I think if when you're less secure about what you're doing, you're less secure about who you are, so therefore you may rely slightly more on your outward image. Once you become more settled in what you're doing, your path, your vision, or at least you've decided on it, your appearance seems to matter a bit less.
Would you say it's influenced at all by the music you listen to or make?
I don't actively go out and look for items of clothing because they align with something that one of my favourite musicians has worn. Maybe subconsciously.
It's that idea of Rock music having a certain image.
Yeah, I play Indie Rock so on some level yeah it probably aligns.
MARRICK — March 2017
HOME — March 2017
Would you say you're a Musician first or a Photographer?
What came first was Music, but what seems to have dominated my life for the past couple years has been photography. I think these different pursuits in your life come in stages and depending on how much work you put into them, how inspired you're feeling with one discipline as opposed to another. The people you have around your is hugely important and also what you have to spend you're time doing. If you're at Uni, there's certain things you have to be studying. I'm studying Film and by nature of that I've become more interested in image making. Putting those influences to practise through my own Photography and Filmmaking. But what comes first for me is always going to be Music. You know it's the one thing you'll have to pursue if at the end of the day you're knackered, you're pissed off, stressed, whatever, and you pick that thing up, you do it and then you're happy. That's the thing you know you should be pursuing. To me what I'm looking towards is putting twice the amount of energy on developing as a Musician, as a Songwriter, as a Player and then using the skills I've been hyper-focused on, with Photography & Videomaking and integrating that into creating something around Music. I'm really trying to figure it out, it's one of the hardest things. It's a blessing to have multiple avenues and draw on multiple skills, but it is extremely hard to integrate them and not be pigeonholed. For someone to say, “what are you?”, “I am A, B, C...”. Especially with social media and people know you for a certain thing, people definitely know me for my Photography more than my music. I don't put out my music until I think it's perfect and that's a huge thing I'm trying to get over, I've become accustomed to with Photography there being a certain standard to put out but it doesn't stop me with experimenting with things, I've started a live music page which I'm really excited about, it's something I'm hugely passionate about and have a massive portfolio. With my own personal music it's the same, I have more songs sitting in my voice memos and Logic & Ableton files than I can count but it's a much harder process than editing a photo and sharing it with the world. Filmmaking is slightly harder but it's the same principles. They speak for themselves.
As a Musician, what do you think of silence when you're working?
My mind goes between desiring silence or not. Editing, I definitely think music will shape the way I edit, strangely. Synaesthesia is a fashionable term and I'm not a Synesthete but I definitely see parallels between certain colours and maybe certain moods of music with certain tonalities, certain intervals. Interestingly I've found that the process of grading, shaping your colours in Lightroom or Photoshop, there are so many parallels with shaping & sculpting sound, it's actually uncanny. To me both of the processes, recording music and editing an image is about balance. After a certain point you start to see parallels to the tools you use, even something as simple as curves is incredibly similar to sculpting a sound. To me that's really cool.
Are the themes of the genres of music you listen to reflected in your Photography?
I'm really going to have to psychoanalyse myself here. Yes, weirdly. The images I share or seem to be the most popular with my audience are quite ambient, that's the best way to describe them.
Atmospheric?
I suppose so, the reason I say ambient is because it's one of my favourite genres of music to compose, so yes. I'd never thought about that, I suppose there must be a parallel. Whenever I'm scoring films it always gravitates towards ambient and that has to be affected by the images I'm looking at. That will definitely have had something to do with spending so much time on final cut as a kid, figuring out how to cut to music and maybe it's shaped the way I create. The Rock music I write or the Blues stuff doesn't really have anything to do with the images that I make. Maybe one day.
HOME — April 2017
BECCA — April 2017
Learning an instrument isn’t easy, like learning another language it can take dedication. How was learning the guitar? Did you ever feel like giving up? - How’d you get through it?
The biggest question is, is your desire to succeed or to see your ideas come together and to hear it for the first time where it goes “oh shit, that's it”, is that desire stronger than your desire to quit. Because dude, of course I think about that, the number of people who raise their eyebrows at you when you say “I want to be a Guitarist”, everyone's a Guitarist, everyone's a Photographer for God's sake. But in a sense you have to tune that out and just power through because at the end of the day increments come very slowly with any creative pursuit. I was thinking about this recently, success in any pursuit is such a gradual thing that feeling like you've achieved your goal will come after so much work that it won't feel like you've achieved your goal. To other it will seem incredible because you've maybe recorded an album or you have X no. of online followers, or you've put an Art gallery together, or you make your own clothes. To people who can't do those things, who haven't dedicated the time it will seem incredible that you have those skills because they haven't seen the work that has been put into it. I'm acutely aware of the fact that I need to put more work into my musicianship and to my songwriting & voice. These are ongoing things, you can talk to the greatest Artist of any field and they'll say they're still learning. The amount of work you put into an instrument is what you get out, I genuinely believe that and it's a constant source of anxiety for me, because when you're a student you straight up don't have time, so I have neglected certain routines I had established in my youth to become better at guitar, at photography. I thank my parents a lot for forcing me to learn piano as a kid, because that's given me a basis that sticks, I can always sit down and play something on the piano, guitar has been a self-driven learning process and my voice is just the same.
Is your Multidisciplinism important to you?
I mentioned earlier that I identify as a third-culture kid. Half-American, Half-British and I suppose that comes through a little bit in the way I talk but it is inherently part of my character so I can't really change that, so that has definitely had an influence on me being able to identify as one thing, or decide to do one thing. I've chosen for it to be an integral part of my character because of the degree I chose to do when I was 17, 18 years old, which is a Liberal Arts degree, which is quite unusual in the UK, but at the core of what I'm doing it's trying to draw parallels between academic disciplines and see how the humanities inform one another. That's actually my final year project, is translation across disciplines, looking at a single case study and trying to understand how all the different humanities feed into one idea. I think I'll never be able to do just one thing but the great thing about that is I'll never be bored. If I get bored of playing guitar, If I ever push this far enough that I'm playing stages, my goal is to play festivals, I'd love to have a live band, If I wan't to complement that I would straight after the gig, I'd be down in the pits shooting the next Artist. That makes me extraordinarily happy to know I'll always have something else I can fall on that I love.
Do you feel that you’ve changed or impacted the world? Is that something you've thought about?
Yes, that's absolutely something I've thought about. We're a generation of narcissists for God's sake, c'mon we all think about it. Okay, there's a few parts to this answer; the first is yes I think about it everyday, I think about the best way of doing it would be, whether that's through creating images, I thought I wanted to be a photojournalist, my Dad was a photojournalist, for a long time I thought I wanted to go into war photography. That desire is still nagging at me, to me that's one of the only truly world-changing things I could do, music is huge obviously if you get successful enough which is highly unlikely, people will listen to your voice but even then it's “he's a musician, he's not...”. I'm too young, I'm too inexperienced to tell people what you do with my songs. The second part to that is whether I should, or we all have a moral responsibility to, if regardless of whether we're Creatives or work in service, industry, or any sector, whether we should all be making time to help our fellow Human beings. I did a bit of traveling and volunteering, now that I look back I was extremely young, I was encouraged to do it, but it does have ethical questions in with it. How much help can a 17, 18-year-old kid be. I volunteered with children, and it was a humbling experience, but looking back on it, I don't think I had much impact. They won't remember me, and I wasn't there long enough to make a lasting change. That's something I think about quite a lot. In terms of aligning it with my creative stuff, I think I'll either be doing some war photography or doing some photojournalism, or being a documentarian, I think that would be hugely impactful. The flip-side of that is thinking about whether you're the right person or voice to do that. You have to know what your strengths are and it may be that someone else is better at telling that story than you. Maybe you're better at making the images or the music to help with that.
That moral responsibility, do you think that's to yourself or to maybe your audience to do some good? With 10,000 people looking at what you're doing, do you feel you have to?
To me, that audience doesn't really matter. I still talk to people the same as I always have really. I suppose I do try and put positivity out there because there's so much negativity on the internet. Even if you're having a crap day, put something positive out. I guess if I gained a larger audience at any point in my life it would start to become more of a responsibility but no, I don't think people look to me for you know, life changing ideas. But as someone with at least a little semblance of entrepreneurial spirit, I think it's super important for our generation, where being an entrepreneur is fashionable and for people to think, not just about how much money they can make or how they can sell their start up, but whether that start up is doing any good. There's so many sectors, so much human effort going into things which, on a surface level are quite trivial; the consumption of media, marketing, all these things are profit driven, they're not necessarily doing actionable good in the world, and I think that's interesting. I hope it will change. I do hope our generation takes up the flag.
Where do you see your work going? What's on the immediate horizons?
My photography is something I've been chipping away at for a number of years and I'm happy with it, It's something that will continue to develop and it change according to how I change and where I go. I would love to do more portraits or people, my work is definitely more about urban stuff & live music so I'd like to tell more human stories. Same with my filmmaking, working on a documentary at the moment about an Artist / Musician, a multidisciplinary who's incredibly inspiring, he makes instruments out of anything he can find, so that's a huge part of telling intimate stories about people. I want to develop my filmmaking, become a better documentarian. I also would love to create travel content, that is something I would absolutely love to pursue as a job I think to sustain living in London after I graduate. With my music obviously I'm saying it last, but it's my main things, I'm working on recording my first EP and honestly just developing as a Guitarist, as a Musician. It's just an ongoing process isn't it? Especially if you have three things that you're doing, you have to juggle them all. The writing skills I've got from Uni, I have no idea what I'm going to do with those, but I'm sure it'll work out. I could think about freelance writing, journalism perhaps. I'm just developing all three and seeing how I can find cohesion between them. I'm starting my own company at the moment, so one day my end goal is to create unified packages of content, because as much as I'd like to drop everything and be a starving Artist, pursue a craft as a Musician, be sad and poor. I don't have to be, I have developed skills at this point which could lead to a really interesting life so I'm trying to reconcile a bit of artistic integrity and also being a social media person, creating content which people love. So the end goal would be to create holistic packages where I can do Photography, compose the music, and make the film.
HOME — March 2017
