ray k. metzker

The world lost one its greatest photographers last week. Ray K. Metzker died at the age of 83. For those of you who had the opportunity to see the gorgeous Metzker exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 2011, I trust you fell in love with his work then - if you hadn’t already been a fan. Metzker’s talk in Kansas City was, at it turned out, his last major public appearance.

Keith F. Davis, curator of that sweeping survey of Metzker’s work (the show also traveled to the Getty in LA and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle), had this to say then about the work, the man and NAMA's collection of prints:

“Metzker’s photographs strike a unique balance between formal brilliance, optical innovation, and a deep human regard for the objective world. Ray Metzker is one of the most dedicated, innovative, and influential American photographers of the last half-century. His work is at once varied in approach and rigorously unified in creative sensibility: he is interested in both the reality of the world and in the inventive potential of the photographic process itself. Thanks to a 2009 gift from the Hall Family Foundation, the Nelson-Atkins now has the largest institutional holding of Metzker’s work (92 prints) in the country.”

“Ray had a relentless pursuit of personal growth as an artist,” long-time dealer Laurence Miller said of the photographer, whose career spanned six decades. “It didn't take him long to realize a single-frame image is not as interesting as a multi-frame image. He kept exploring and pushing.

“Over the years, the graphic qualities of his work became more emotional. Where black and white images were about light and shadow [in his early work], in his later work they became more about light and darkness as a spiritual thing. The pictures became richer and richer.”

Metzker used a variety of in-camera and darkroom techniques to create his work, including multiple exposures, superimposition and juxtaposition of negatives, and solarization.

He was born in Milwaukee in 1931. After earning a degree at Beloit, he attended the Institute of Design in Chicago from 1956 to 1959. There, he studied under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, among others.

“What Callahan and Siskind gave to Ray was the belief that you could pursue a lifetime of making pictures, that it was worth doing, rather than being a journalist, or fashion photographer, or commercial photographer as most others did,” Miller said. “Ray chose to live a humble life and make pictures. His work wasn't on the cover of Vogue. He didn't need to scream out, I'm great. He did it very quietly.”

After graduating from the Institute of Design, Metzker spent about two years in Europe before settling in Philadelphia in 1962. In his earliest work, he photographed unaware pedestrians in unassuming urban landscapes, concerning himself with the interplay of light, shadow and graphical elements.

From the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s, he created several ground-breaking bodies of work, including his Composites series, using entire rolls of film to creating single images that could be read in various ways; and his “Pictus Interruptus” series, for which he held objects in front of his camera lens to partially obscure the scene, creating abstract images that juxtaposed in-focus and out-of-focus elements.

During the last three decades of his career, Metzker returned to photographing cityscapes, particularly in Philadelphia, making poetic images that incorporated the vocabulary and technique he had honed over the years.

Ray was an extremely gentle and caring human being who possessed very little ego,” Miller said last week. “He really cared about the average person. His subjects were just ordinary people like you and me. There was no fashion, no models, and it was just about the everyday world. I think that reveals a lot about him. He had a great sense of humor, but he still took things very seriously.”

"He discovered things you'd never notice, never expect - the pattern on something or some cubbyhole," said his wife, the photographer Ruth Thorne-Thomsen. "And the world would never be the same again."

Ms. Thorne-Thomsen would occasionally walk with her husband through Center City, into South Philadelphia, all over the city.

"He would squint, leave one eye open, and then look at his watch," she recalled. "That was so he'd know what time of day it was."

What emerged from his darkroom - Mr. Metzker never used digital technology - "was rich, endlessly rich," she said. "Everything was to be mined, a treasure to be mined."

[some excerpts from an article in PDN were used in this post]

baker gallery, bloch museum, abbie, crewdson...

When I opened my gallery in 1981, there wasn’t a lot of photography action going on in Kansas City and its environs. Collectors here were just beginning to understand the important historical significance of vintage work and the excitement of discovering contemporary images by emerging and mid-career photographers. Hallmark had been actively assembling its major photo collection since the 60’s, but that work was only occasionally seen by the public. Hard core fans had to travel to Chicago, New York or LA if they wanted to see the good stuff on a regular basis.

My place, the Baker Gallery, helped fill in the gaps as much as a small art gallery could do in those early days. Over the years, though, more and galleries began to show photography, and museums ramped up their photo show schedules. The Society for Contemporary Photography (now defunct) was born in a Kansas City collector’s basement in the late-80’s and went on to become a nationally recognized organization. The Kansas City Art Institute continued to build its strong photography program, and more and more talented graduates began renting studio and loft spaces in the area, contributing to a plethora of fascinating exhibitions. Kansas City was truly ready for what took place in 2006 when The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art acquired the Hallmark Photographic Collection. The collection spans the entire history of photography, from the birth of the medium in 1839 to the present. At the time of its acquisition, it included more than 6,500 works by 900 artists, with superb examples by virtually all the key American photographers in history. The collection is housed in the Bloch Building, which triumphantly opened in 2007 to resounding applause from the architectural community worldwide. With the acquisition and the move into this spectacular building, the Nelson-Atkins took its place as one of the premier museums in the world for photography. A great coup for Kansas City and its photography lovers!

I have been privileged to witness and be part of the exciting growth of, acceptance of and enthusiasm for the medium in this great Midwestern city. We’ve definitely come a long way. This past Thursday night, I joined other photo enthusiasts in a packed auditorium at the Nelson-Atkins Museum's Bloch Building to hear a conversation between April Watson (associate curator) and the wildly popular photographer Gregory Crewdson. The Crewdson presentation was made possible by the museum’s Photo Society. I looked around and saw people I’ve known for a long time, people who used to park themselves in chairs at my gallery on Saturday afternoons to talk about photography, to browse through books, to explore the flat files and to hang out with other photo-lovers.

Thursday night I found myself marveling at how our patience and persistence has paid off; we now have the world famous Bloch Building with its world famous collection and its world class curatorial staff right here in our own back yard! Between Keith F. Davis, April Watson and Jane Aspinwall, the collection could not be in better hands.

(Just so you know how full circle this whole thing is for me, I am posting this photo of my daughter Abbie.


She was three years old and was hard at work helping me get the Baker Gallery spruced up for the grand opening of its new location on State Line Road back in 1983. And that wildly popular photographer who spoke Thursday night and then came to my home for a reception in his honor? Abbie’s advisor/professor when she obtained her photo degree from Yale in 2003.)

If you live in the Kansas City area, get ye to the museum. If you don’t, plan a trip to do just that.

homer page

One of the members of the “photo salon” which I am in is Keith Davis, longtime friend and illustrious curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. At our last gathering, Keith had just returned from Meridian Press in Rhode Island with hot-off-the-press signatures of a brand new book tucked under his arm. Little did we know what a treat we were in for: we were among the very first people to get a glimpse of Keith’s groundbreaking work on a photographer we’d never even heard of.

What a gorgeous book! Keith has basically made a major historical discovery in the work of Homer Page (he told me in the kitchen as we were loading up our plates with Gates barbeque that if you Google this guy, you are asked, “did you mean HOME PAGE?” That’s because there are no entries on Page…yet.)

Page lived from 1918 to 1985. He was from California and worked in the Bay Area shipyards during WWII. He took up photography in 1944 with the encouragement of his neighbor and friend, Dorothea Lange. He worked fast… three years later he was featured in a major show at MOMA. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949 and proceeded to produce an amazing body of work in and around NYC during the next twelve months. He achieved much recognition in the fine art world, but ended up turning to a successful career as a magazine photographer. He let only a few of his personal images out of his hands and, as a result, was remembered after his death by a small circle of peers. He has basically been unknown.

Now Keith brings Page’s work to light in a beautiful tri-tone volume and with an impressive exhibition, the latter of which is due to open at the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City on February 14th.

In Keith’s words:

“The importance of Page’s Guggenheim work is a result of both its form and its content. Stylistically, his photographs represent a crucial missing link between the warm, humanistic socially motivated documentary work of the 1930’s and early 1940’s (as seen in the work of Dorothea Lange), and the tougher, moodier, grittier work of the later 1950’s (exemplified by Robert Frank). In Page’s photographs, we find, in essence, a previously unknown bridge between these very different artistic eras.”

If you live in or near Kansas City, don't miss the opportunity to see the exhibition. It should be a knock-out. And I assume the book will be available at places like Photo-Eye and Amazon. Do yourself the favor!

cropping

I used to be quite the purist when it came to using the full frame of the pictures I made. I believe strongly that the ability to compose an image in the viewfinder is an important and necessary skill, one that forces the photographer to be careful, observant, thoughtful and precise. In most of the work I print(ed) in the wet darkroom, I include the black edge of the negative, both as an aesthetic piece and a declaration that what you see in the final image was what the camera captured when I released the shutter.

Working with digital capture has loosened (freed) me up a bit. I do crop now (not always), mainly because I still prefer the square format to the rectangle, and there is no such thing as an affordable square format digital camera. I am in the process of training my eye to impose an imaginary square in the viewfinder. (Yes, I suppose I could use tape or something, but this is actually working for me.)


So, usually the cropping is minimal: a chunk off either side. But there is one picture I made in Uganda that I really did a number on, and it has (surprisingly) become an important piece in this new body of work. You can see the first simple square crop in a post from December 10, 2007. Once home from the trip, I worked on it some more. The final result, a much more severe crop, injected the piece with the emotion that was/is truly there for me. I guess sometimes you just have to dig a little deeper to find what is there. I’m glad I have given myself permission now to do just that.

On a final note, I saw a portrait exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum yesterday. Keith Davis, curator to beat all curators, suggested that a portrait can and usually does reveal “an external truth” AND an “internal truth.” I could not agree more, and in fact, I believe this picture sums that up better than anything I’ve made in a long time.

making stuff

I can vividly recall a conversation I had with my friend Keith Davis on September 12, 2001. I was working on my concentration camp series when 9-11 took place. The next day, I felt a strong desire to head back into the darkroom and continue printing. For some reason, I spoke with Keith that morning. I told him it felt silly, small, unimportant and somewhat selfish to work that day – to create things that seemed entirely insignificant and unnecessary in the wake of such excruciating heartache and pain and devastation. I really couldn’t see working at all again, ever.

Keith simply said, “When things around us are DEconstructing, maybe all we CAN do is attempt to CONstruct.”

Last night and today I have been following the reports of the fires in California, struck again with that sinking feeling of loss and pain that makes it hard to even think about creating something new. Keith’s sage observation came back to me, and I spent the day constructing.

A closer look seems fitting.


(This piece is 32" x 32")

kansas city is on the map big time

There is no way my snapshots can do justice to the magnificent new Bloch Building, the addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum that recently opened to all sorts of well deserved hoopla here in my hometown of Kansas City.

And rather than go on about my impressions of it, I would rather link you to the exuberant and extremely well expressed ones that have been published in
The New Yorker, The New York Times and Time Magazine. Or just do a google search. Pretty much all the reviews have been absolutely stellar.



The addition garnered its share of criticism from local skeptics during the course of its construction. Many Kansas Citians claimed the “lenses” looked like temporary warehouses, or worse yet, storage bins for the construction equipment. Of course, lots of those same people hated the shuttlecocks when they were first installed on the sloping lawns around the old building.







At any rate, while Abbie and Sam were visiting from New Orleans, we made our first real trek over there. I thought the building looked amazing, and it wasn’t even dark out yet (that’s when everyone loves the glowing effects of the lighted lenses - even the doubters.) The photo exhibit that Keith Davis has put together is mind blowing.

During our visit to the museum store, Abbie and Sam obligingly overreacted for the camera as they discovered my book, Convergence, for sale on the shelves!

bye-bye scp

In 1984, a bunch of photography enthusiasts gathered on a monthly basis in the basement of a Kansas City doctor - a photo collector and founder of the group - to hammer out the mission and goals for a fledgling organization called the Society for Contemporary Photography. We were a glorified camera club at first. SCP grew into a downtown gallery space and started having exhibitions of local and regional photographers, then grew in to a larger space and started having shows by nationally known photo-based artists. SCP sponsored the well respected and highly anticipated annual juried show, “Current Works”, featuring internationally recognized curators as its jurors and important works by emerging photographers in its exhibitons.

As of mid-February, SCP will be no more.

Kathy Aron Dowell, the current director and curator, announced today: “When the SCP began, most established institutions and galleries did not accept photography as a ‘viable’ fine art medium. Our mission was clear. Since that time, the photographic community has accomplished a great deal, and we now find photography exhibits and educational opportunities flourishing around the globe. Of course, this is good news for photography, but it also means that photo-centric organizations like SCP face funding challenges alongside institutions with much larger development, staffing and/or Board resources.”

Is this a case of “be careful what you wish for”?

Luckily for Kansas City, we have the Nelson-Atkins Museum, and we have Keith Davis. Since the Hallmark Photographic Collection was acquired by the museum and Keith was kept at the helm, this city will finally get the recognition it deserves for its significant photography holdings, as well its curator who is easily one of the most well respected and knowledgeable photo historians in the country (also a very nice guy).

I guess it was a good run. Twenty-three years. I guess, too, that none of us in Tony’s basement back in those early days could ever have imagined what SCP would eventually become. It does sound kind of unimaginable that photography was not considered a “viable fine art medium.” We’ve come a long way.