Philip Melnick has been actively involved with photography, art, music, and theater, since his early teenage years in the late 1940's. His first nationally published photographs date from the mid-1950's. He has exhibited personal work since the mid 1960s. Since the early 1970's, this work has taken the form of a number of long-term documentary-style photographic projects, presented as groups of mid-to large-scale black and white prints.