Ray Metzker
Ray Metzker’s Pictus Interruptus series, made between 1976 and 1981, offers us inexplicable images - landscapes and cityscapes disrupted by abstract forms that combine, complement, and contrast with recognizable elements of the city or the land. He achieved these myriad effects by way of a simple premise-in each picture a single object, an "interrupter", is held up between the camera's lens and the subject.
In Metzker's own words from his journal at the time: "It becomes clearer...that I am looking for the unknown which in fact disturbs, is foreign in subject but hauntingly right for the picture, the workings of which seem inexplicable, at the very least, a surprise."
Reviewing the show for the New Yorker Vince Aletti said:
"Metzker is experimental, restless, and brilliant—a street photographer who sees the world in fragments and distortions. “Pictus Interruptus,” the black-and-white series shown here, is especially disorienting, each image a cleverly unbalanced mixture of in-focus and out-of-focus elements, including pieces of paper thrust before the lens. The resulting abstractions render the urban landscape almost unrecognizable—a fun house you wouldn’t mind getting lost in.
Six of Metzker's street photography abastractions, from his classic 1957-1966 period, are given an in depth look.
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.
