Ray K. Metzker

Ray K. Metzker has quietly been making extraordinary photographs for the better part of six decades. Today, he is recognized as one of the great masters of American photography, a virtuoso who has pursued his chosen medium passionately for fifty years. 

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 in the 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.

Chicago, 1957
8 x 10" silver print
Edition 25

Chicago, 1958
8 x 10" silver print
Edition 3

Chicago, 1958
8 x 10" silver print
Edition 5

Philadelphia, 1962
8 x 10" silver print
Edition 25

Philadelphia, 1963
8 x 10" silver print
Edition 10

Philadelphia, 1964
10 x 8" silver print
Edition 25

Philadelphia, 1964
10 x 8" silver print
Edition 20

Philadelphia
Penn Center, 1965
6 x 6"" silver print

Atlantic City, 1966
11 x 14" silver print
Edition 25

Philadelphia, 1965
(double frame)
8 x 10" silver print
Edition 25

Philadelphia, 1965
(double frame)
10 x 8" silver print
Edition 25

Philadelphia, 1966
(double frame)
10 x 8" silver print
Edition 25

Atlantic City, 1968
(couplet)
10 x 8" silver print
Edition 20

Atlantic City, 1968
(couplet)
10 x 8" silver print
Edition 25

Philadelphia, 1968
(double frame)
14 x 11" silver print
Edition 25

Denver, Colorado, 1986
from the series Earthly Delights
16 x 20" silver print
Edition 25

Virginia, 1988
from the series Earthly Delights
16 x 20" silver print
Edition 25

Provence, France, 1989
from the series Sojourn
16 x 20" silver print
Edition 25

Provence, France, 1989
from the series Sojourn
16 x 20" silver print
Edition 25

Moab, Utah, 1994
16 x 20" silver print
Edition 25

Moab, Utah, 1995
16 x 20" silver print
Edition 25