AIPAD 2023
A Preview Of Our Selection For The 2023 Photography Show, Presented By AIPAD
March 31 – April 2, 2023
Chicago, 1957
Vintage gelatin silver print
Chicago, 1958
Frankfurt, 1961
Philadelphia, 1963
Philadelphia: Sailors II, 1964
25 vintage gelatin silver prints
On 10 x 10 inch mount
Signed on verso
Unique Composite
Atlantic City, 1966
Double Frame, Atlantic City, 1968
Whimsy 34A, 1974
four vintage gelatin silver prints
6 x 6" framed to 10.75 10.75"
Pictus Interruptus, 1977
Mykonos, 1979
Philadelphia, 1980
Philadelphia, 1981
Philadelphia, 1981
Sojoun, France, 1989
Sojoun, France, 1989
Moab, 1994
Philadelphia, 1996
Ray K. 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, a virtuoso who pursued his chosen medium passionately throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st.
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-AtkinsMuseum 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.”
Ray Metzker died in October 2014 at 83 in Philadelphia, a city he had made his home and frequent subject since 1962.
Six of Metzker's street photography abastractions, from his classic 1957-1966 period, are given an in depth look.
The Museum of Modern Art has reinstalled its fourth-floor collection galleries with works exclusively from the 1960s. Interweaving works from all of MoMA’s curatorial departments the galleries proceed chronologically, with work installed by year. Among the works featured from 1966 is Ray Metzker's photographic composite Trolley Stop. Other featured artists include Richard Tuttle, Agnes Martin, Sigmar Polke, Vija Celmins, and Joseph Beuys.
Ray K. Metzker, a modernist photographer who called himself “an intellectual wanderer” and proved it over six decades of audacious experiment — he sometimes overlapped exposures to make a single picture from a roll of film — died in Philadelphia at age 83.
