Mike Nyerges

Tell something about your family. What were your early childhood influences

regarding art? 

I come from a family of musicians and artists. I have three brothers.

John is a professional jazz pianist. Alex is a widely exhibited photographer. Paul is

currently working in intaglio prints. My mother, Lee, taught ceramics when she was

young and turned to watercolors later in life. My earliest memory of my mom’s work

is the life-size, drying clay head of a man in the bathtub. I was four.

Did you go to college? Where? Major?

I painted and worked in paper collage in my late teens and early twenties. I also worked in clay for a time. I studied piano, voice, and music history and theory from a very young age, attending the Hochstein School and the Eastman Community Music School. I was a soloist in the Rochester Saenger Jugen Choir as well as in my college chorus at SUNY Geneseo, traveling in Europe with

each. I majored in music composition and theory and came very close to a BS degree in music before switching to a different program.

What type of art do you create? Has your style changed over time?

I’ve only returned to the visual arts since retirement. Wanting to avoid the challenges of the clean-up and storage I remembered when I was painting, I turned to photography. I intended my work to be solely digital, until Rhonda, my wife, insisted I begin printing it. (I’m still avoiding the ‘clean-up.’)

What is your most favorite artist tool, technique?

I frequently use the camera as a painter’s knife by moving the camera with long exposures, a

technique known as Intentional Camera Movement. Light becomes fluid with ICM, creating vivid

abstract and expressionistic images. I also fuse images together to create photo-composites. These deepen the meaning of moments that may have occurred randomly and apart but together offer a scaffolding to explore ideas, feelings and beliefs. Perhaps this is a strange use of the camera, using it to paint. Yet light is the easiest of materials to work and a ready source of interest and beauty. 

What are you currently working on?

Lately, I’m combining images and writing, usually poetry to describe, extend, and deepen my

photographic work. This is known as ekphrasis. I write when an image stirs in me a need to amplify feelings and ideas or explore their connections to me, society and culture. My most recent poem is for my photo-composite, “To Be Seen Or Not To Be” and examines the existential challenge that underlies my work and website, https://fallinginward.com/

To Be Seen or Not To Be

Is this how the journey ends?

On a stairway?

Is this the journey's end

To be seen or not to be

Whether in the frame or behind the lens

A vainglorious weaving

Symphonies written in secret

Near-random scattering of moments obsessively ensnared

Self-absorbed

Sensory entablement in the strewing of leaves

Force, Harmony, Dissonance and Beauty

Shadows and Grey Winters

In these narrow, ill-fitted sleeves

Will any moment

Experienced

Remain?

May 2026