Look Inside
Which art books, prints and posters are available by and about this artist? Here is a sample of items of interest to a typical collector:
Ray K. Metzker's stunning streetscapes are captured in this celebration of the photographer's work. These black-and-white photographs, taken over a quarter century and presented here by visual themes, show Metzker pushing the technical boundaries of photography into an undefined formal realm well beyond the expected. Photographs demonstrate Metzker's command of light and shade: four figures wait pensively at a bus stop, as though caged in glass, staring boldly into a wedge of bright light; a lone woman stands outside a train station, engulfed in an ominous stripe of inky shadow, with only the white of her necklace and a folded newspaper as talismans to ward off the darkness. Whether the photographs capture people waiting to take action, or people already in motion, Metzker's technique estranges them from the lockstep rhythm of mundane activity, and makes them stand still - just for a moment. The result is a series of photographs that demands a reinterpretation of the city and its inhabitants.
Published on the occasion of the major exhibition "Unknown Photographs by Ray K. Metzger," organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (November 17, 1984 -- January 29, 1985), and traveling to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (April 12 -- June 16, 1985), The Art Institute of Chicago (July 27 -- September 19, 1985), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (October 19, 1985 -- January 5, 1986), The High Museum of Art, Atlanta (March 22 -- May 4, 1986), the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York (June 6 -- August 10, 1986) and the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (September 12 -- November 23, 1986).
%20Resized.webp)
Ray K. Metzker, American (1931-2014)
Metzker quietly made extraordinary and influential photographs over the course of a five decade career. Today, he is recognized as one of the great masters of American photography, especially for his mastery of light and shadows.
Metzker was born in 1931 in Milwaukee and attended the Institute of Design, Chicago--a renowned school that had a few years earlier been dubbed the New Bauhaus-- from 1956 to 1959. He was thus an heir to the avant-garde photography that had developed in Europe in the 1920's. Early in his career, his work was marked by unusual intensity. Composites, multiple-exposure, superimposition of negatives, juxtapositions of two images, solarization and other formal means were part and parcel of his vocabulary. He was committed to discovering the potential of black and white photography during the shooting and the printing, and has shown consummate skill in each stage of the photographic process. Ray Metzker's unique and continually evolving mastery of light, shadow, and line transform the ordinary into a realm of pure visual delight.
Major American museums began showing an interest in Metzker's work in the 1960's. Cementing his reputation as a master photographer, the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him his first one-man show in 1967. Retrospectives were organized in 1978 by the International Center of Photography in New York, and in 1984 by the Museum of fine Arts in Houston. The Houston exhibit was subsequently shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the International Museum of Photography, Rochester, and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.
In 2011, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City organized a major retrospective of Metzker's work that travelled to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Henry Art Museum in Seattle.
Keith F. Davis, senior curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins describes Metzker’s work as the “very best of a classic form of American modernism” that “transcended any simple notion of technical experimentation or formalism to illuminate a vastly larger human realm.”
His most famous books include Sand Creatures, 1979 and City Stills, 1999.
Ray Metzker died in October 2014 at 83 in Philadelphia, a city he had made his home and frequent subject since 1962.
German publisher Roland Angst is well-known for his fine taste in choosing projects and producing exquisite photography books through his publishing house Only Photography. He visited Ray K. Metzker and personally selected the wonderful “car” images for this publication. They are not really what one would expect in a book called AutoMagic. What we get is certainly more Magic than Auto. The straight and graphic views of Matzker's images include cars or parts of cars, all perfectly composed. His lines are clear and strong, nothing is left to chance – even the shadows are exactly where they should be, and the reflections force us to look twice. The black and white pictures were taken between 1958 and 2007, although the majority of the images stem from the mid-1960s, when cars still had recognizably individual characters.
Andreas H. Bitesnich, Achtung photography