Photo of the Week #237

March 20, 2023
This vintage print is a perfect example of Ray Metzker’s vision of humanistic urbanism finding its earliest expression. The picture elegantly states themes he would explore throughout his career: a solitary figure moving like a stage actor across a backdrop of inky shadows—with architectural elements reduced to a rhythmic play of abstract form. In short, a view of the 20th century city that was as poetic as it was astute.

This photograph was made when Metzker was a graduate student in photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago. The school was founded as the New Bauhaus in 1937 by László Moholy-Nagy and thus embodied the migration of Modernist artists and ideas from war-torn Europe to the optimistic bustle of the United States. Before his death in 1946, Nagy hired Metzker’s teacher Harry Callahan, and when Callahan left for a sabbatical in France in 1957, Metzker was mentored by Callahan’s own recruit, Aaron Siskind. 

Both Siskind and Callahan were developing a uniquely American, and highly abstract, approach to street photography. Metzker’s contribution to this lineage, with his use of urban form that is both distilled and refracted, arguably goes the farthest in absorbing Constructivist concepts from the European avant-garde, finding them to be well suited for expressing the unique contours of American city life.