Draft:Merrick Morton

Merrick Morton (born 1955 in Hollywood, CA) is a documentary street photographer, and co-founder of the gallery, Fototeka, in Los Angeles. Morton is best known for his black and white photographic portraits of LA's barrios and inner-city communities which "helped pioneer modern street photography" while on assignment for Rolling Stone Magazine.

Morton continues to work in Hollywood as a film set still photographer on movies such as Fight Club, La Bamba , and Rampart. In the early 1980s, he started photographing the East Los Angeles cholo culture, ultimately co-founding the L.A. Six, a "collective of street photographers documenting the subcultures of Los Angeles". Describing this work, Morton acknowledges that he was one of the first white photographers to enter the barrio territories. By allowing himself to be an outsider, he ultimately gained the respect of his subjects who opened their lives to his camera.

In 2001, Morton and his wife, Robin Blackman, received access to the photographic archives of the Los Angeles Police Department. They saved many of the deteriorating negatives taken by police officers in the line of duty. "Through curation and presentation in a gallery setting, they achieve a secondary purpose, offering a real-life window in a world familiar to most present-day viewers through film noir". The crime scene photos have been exhibited from Los Angeles to Russia, traveling to the Moscow House of Photography in 2012.