Merry Moor Winnett

In her last two years, she continued to teach and produce photographs. In early 1994, after winning the Artist of the Year in Winston-Salem, she created a series of seventy-five handmade photographs titled Hurry Home. By using five different negatives and duplicating film, she constructed a large-format, master negative. Later, she made contact prints onto Agfa Portriga paper that were selectively toned with Berg Blue Toner and hand-tinted with Dr. Ph. Martin's Iridescent dyes.

Winnett's best known photographs were part of The Moon Series, also called Moonstruck. Over half of the photographs in this series were inspired by a class (The Moon, Fact and Fancy) that she team-taught at Guilford College in 1991. During this time, she was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 39.

In 1989, Winnett was one of fifteen contemporary women photographers selected from a national search to be featured in the feminist journal The Creative Woman. This issue celebrated the 150th year since the invention of photography with tributes to some outstanding women photographers historically and currently. Winnett wrote her own summary, which revealed how and why she did her artwork. She described her techniques as gender-specific, especially her hand-stitching (sewing) and other decorative embellishments like sequins, ribbons, and metallic foils. She believed that male and female artists have different perspectives even when addressing similar concepts.

One of Winnett's environmental landscapes is Twenty Years… (1988), in which a huge moon hovers over dilapidated gasoline pumps labeled NASA and surrounded by overgrown weeds. One interpretation relates to American moon explorations in the late 1960s, when Exxon examined the possibility of replacing fossil fuels (in "twenty years") with minerals (such as He3) harvested from the moon.

On April 5, 1975, Merry Moor married Tommy Edward Winnett (also a graduate of the University of South Florida). In 1978, his employment was transferred to Greensboro, North Carolina, where the couple resided until her death on October 17, 1994.

Between 1974 and 1975, Winnett's first solo art exhibits at the University of South Florida (USF) were displays of unconventional photographic prints characterized by art reviewer Angelo Resciniti as a "no-holds barred" show.

Between 1974 and 1994, Winnett won seventy prizes in national and international competitions from jurors such as Van Deren Coke, Marcia Tucker, Evon Streetman, Jerry Uelsmann, Ellen Land-Weber, Barbara Morgan and Arnold Doren. These exhibitions were held in twenty-eight states and nine European countries.

The techniques Winnett used included Van Dyke brown, composite printing, collage, solarization, split-toning, stitching, tinting, and infrared. An influence on Winnett was the printmaker Donald Saff, who in 1971 had been named the Dean of Fine Arts at USF. He encouraged experimentation with all media including photography as a tribute to his colleague Robert Rauschenberg, who lived nearby in Captiva. Until the mid-1960s, fine arts majors at most colleges and universities were not permitted to concentrate in photography. Winnett, who had been interested in photography since childhood, was enthusiastic about the new policies at USF.

By the late 1970s, Winnett had won awards in every major photography competition in Florida. After relocating to North Carolina, she was surprised to win two of the top prizes in her first NC competition. During the next fourteen years, she gained international recognition and produced a prolific body of work with innovative techniques and thought-provoking imagery.

Winnett was an active member of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), which originated in the 1960s, providing a forum for the discussion of photography as a means of creative expression and cultural insight. Conservation of nature was one of the cultural issues that the group advocated.

Merry (Moor) Winnett (1951–1994) was an American photographer noted for experimental imagery.

Merry Moor was born on November 24, 1951, in Newport News, Virginia to Florence Corinne Davidson and Willard L. Moor. After her parents divorced in 1973, she and her brother lived with their mother in Tampa, Florida. She attended Arthur Hill High School in Saginaw, Michigan between 1964 and 1969, then went on to Michigan State University and the University of South Florida, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Art in 1975, magna cum laude.