Ray K. Metzker 1931-2014

Ray K. Metzker 1931-2014

I am desperately sorry to report that Ray K. Metzker has died at the age of 83, following a long decline. The news struck at me deeply, because nothing makes an artist I don't know personally more alive to me than engaging fully and deeply with his or her work, and I spent several months this past year finally fully engaging wholeheartedly with Ray's art through the medium of the excellent book by Keith Davis, The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker, published by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, one of the best books of 2012 for me (although very unfortunately no longer in print now).

Ray was an experimentalist with a brilliant sense of graphic composition using deep shadow as bold black shapes, and he was especially sensitive to repetition, minimalism and shapes. He was the kind of photographer who is rare in any era but is growing rarer now in that he was fully an artist and also fully and completely a photographer—his work is rooted in straight photography but he was also always alive to how it worked as form and implication. His work seems somehow mid-20th-century to me, his closest compatriots people like Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan (with whom he studied), although he wasn't like either one very precisely; I think of him as being just as close to Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline and several other artists.

I highly recommend a good soak in Keith's book if you can get your hands on it, perhaps at the library. Keith Davis makes his usual skilled and humane case for the artist with his selections and sequencing, somehow evincing a fuller picture and implying greater breadth rather than exposing weaknesses. It's a lovely book and a fine way to encounter Metzker. There are of course many books.

There's an obituary by David Walker at PDNonline.com.

Mike

(Thanks to Oren Grad)

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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