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The city as light. Ray K. Metzker grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was born in 1931. At an early age, he developed an emotional affinity with light that remained with him for the duration of his career as a photographer. The major cities Chicago and Philadelphia offered him a host of opportunities for exploration that enabled him to shine in a realm where his peers and predecessors – in particular his teachers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design in Chicago – had left their mark in the 1950s and 1960s. Nevertheless, the training Metzker received at this school, founded as the New Bauhaus in 1937 by the Hungarian avant-garde artist and educator László Moholy-Nagy, led him to emphasize experimentation and the interconnecting of disciplines. The Institute offered him a fertile environment in which to create, construct and explore photography at a more complex level than he had previously. The street became for him a place to experiment, to discover rhythms, relationships and concepts that inspired him throughout his life. From utterly silent images of a lone silhouette in a city street to large-scale compositions made up of multiple images and bands, Metzker’s liberated visual approach allowed him to develop great visual mastery.
This exhibition at A Foundation, the second large solo Metzker exhibition to be held in Europe (after Light Lines, at the Musée de l’Élysee in Lausanne in 2008), celebrates the artist with 114 photographs ten years after his death on 9 October 2014. These black-and-white prints with tonal values of incomparable richness were executed by the photographer himself. They are from the Ray K. Metzker estate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Les Douches la Galerie in Paris, his exclusive representative in Europe. Several emblematic series are shown together here at A Foundation: The Loop (1957−1959), Europe (1960−1961), Early Philadelphia (1962−1964), Pictus Interruptus (1976−1980), City Whispers (1980−1983) and Composites, begun in 1964.