Last spring, Lake Highlands resident Merrill Hartman had a photography exhibit at ST Cafe. It was there that he had an epiphany about why he enjoys taking pictures so much.

“I had this woman in a wheelchair come up to me with tears in her eyes,” says Hartman, 65. “She said to me, ‘I just want to tell you how much I appreciate you putting these pictures up. These are things I would never have been able to see on my own.’

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“And I just said, ‘Well, thank you for telling me why I did it.’ It was very inspiring.”

Hartman, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1969, already knows a little bit about inspiring others, though he’s probably too modest to admit it. A judge with the 192nd civil district court, Hartman founded Dallas’ first free volunteer legal clinic for the poor in 1983, has volunteered his time on the boards of many legal organizations, and been the recipient of numerous awards recognizing his selfless contributions to the legal trade.

As much devotion as he has given his law career, however, his first love is still photography. He has been taking photos since childhood, when his parents gave him his first camera, a Brownie Hawkeye. But it wasn’t until the mid-’60s, after he’d graduated from law school and was working in Washington, D.C., as a legislative aide for J.J. Pickles, that he started taking his hobby more seriously.

There, he met up with a high school friend from Dallas. Dennis Brack, whose work has graced the covers of Time and Newsweek, among others, was working for Blackstar, a professional photographer’s agency. He showed Hartman some of the tricks of the trade, and also introduced him to others in the business.

“It was a lot of fun,” Hartman says now. “Through Dennis, I met other photographers that had different kinds of gigs. One did a lot of work for National Geographic. He took me out, and we did a story called ‘Flowering Washington’ at the National Arboretum. I was his assistant on that shoot, and it taught me how to shoot flowers. I came back and went to our arboretum and shot a bunch of beautiful flower stuff there.”

To this day, Hartman prefers to shoot outdoors. For him, natural subjects are an affirmation of his faith.

“When I get back from an outdoor shoot, and I’ve got beautiful cloud formations, and waves that are just in the right place, and the water looks inky blue and everything’s right,” he says, “well…I just think God is one beautiful artist.

“It’s not that I’m a great photographer,” he says. “It’s that God has shown me what to take pictures of.”

Some of Hartman’s favorite photos are of Utah and the American Southwest.

“Brice, Arches, Zion and Grand Canyon [national parks]. They’re just beautiful,” he says. “I’ve gone two or three times, taking my son, Max. That’s my idea of a good vacation – to pack him up with another camera bag and take off to the Canyonlands.”

For his part, Max is an enthusiastic participant.

“Taking pictures has been just a reason for us to get together, to travel around and go to great places,” Max says. “We spend a lot of time in the car, talking. He’s my dad, but he’s also my counselor, in terms of us having a lot of father/son kind of talks as we cruise around.”

These times together have become especially important since Hartman was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the late ’90s.

“I was getting sort of stumbley,” he says, recalling the symptoms that led to his diagnosis. “My gait was getting kind of stiff, and I was getting some tremor and having loss of flexibility.”

Though he was initially afraid the disease would severely impact his life and his hobby, so far it hasn’t. A fairly new drug regimen has quieted a lot of Hartman’s symptoms, particularly his tremors. Though he’s using a tripod more often than he used to, the disease has had little other effect on his picture-taking.

“The kind of photography I do – what I laughingly refer to as drive-by shooting – means I go to beautiful places I can get to with easy access,” he says.

Max says he thinks the diagnosis “affected those of us in the family more than it has him.”

“He just trucks on like there’s no issue there,” he says. “I mean, he’s never moaned or complained or anything like that. He has such a strong faith and is so spiritual. He’s on a different level than just the physical.”

Hartman echoes this. “I live in happy denial; I don’t dwell on it or deal with it any more than I have to,” he says. “Because I think it’s better if I just take my pills and go about my work and live my life. I try not to let it define who I am.”

Who he is, he says, is increasingly dominated these days by thoughts of how he can use his extensive photography collection to help others.

“What always strikes me is how uplifted people are by the pictures,” he says. “What I finally concluded is that the grace of God works through his natural beauty, that he’s given me the gift of showing that natural beauty on film, and that I shouldn’t ignore that ability but use it to help uplift people.”

And, though he has taken thousands of photos in his lifetime, he has no intentions of slowing down. If anything, the hobby consumes him more than it ever has.

“I’m not over it yet, he says. “And I hope I never get over it.”