Ray K. Metzker, 83, famed photographer

Ray K. Metzker, 83, widely considered one of the nation's greatest photographers, died Thursday, Oct. 9, after a long illness.

A spare and somewhat laconic figure, Mr. Metzker came to Philadelphia in 1962 to teach at the Philadelphia College of Art - now part of the University of the Arts - and fell in love with the shadow-streaked streets of the old city.

Known for his black-and-white images of the urban streetscape - a man walking past the Fidelity Bank building, a woman captured by a shaft of sunlight, a sailor in whites stepping into an ominous shadow - Mr. Metzker walked the city decade after decade, finding the remarkable in the ordinary and the powerful in the most fleeting.

"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."

Peter Barberie, curator of photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art - which mounted two solo exhibitions of Mr. Metzker's work, "Voyage of Discovery: The Landscape Photographs of Ray K. Metzker" in 2000 and "Unknown Territory: Photographs by Ray K. Metzker" in 1985 - called Mr. Metzker "an artist of remarkable subtlety."

Barberie continued: "He approached most of his motifs as formal pictorial problems, yet time and again he turned them into warm records of human presence. He was a beloved figure in the photography community here."

Laurence Miller, a longtime friend whose New York City gallery represented Mr. Metzker, made the same point.

Mr. Metzker was clearly concerned with formal issues of light and dark, space, balance, design, composite imagery, Miller said. But his work was in essence about the human condition.

"Ray is . . . formally inventive," Miller remarked. "But as I grew more familiar with Ray, I realized his images were filled with content. They're about people. . . . There's invention everywhere."

In the 1980s, Mr. Metzker turned his attention to landscape, becoming "totally" engaged with it, said Sueyun Locks, director of the Locks Gallery, which held seven exhibitions for Mr. Metzker's work over the years.

"He was able to capture anything with that camera," she said.

One of his photographs, Nude Composite: Philadelphia, 1966 sold at Christie's last month for $68,750.

Mr. Metzker was born in Milwaukee in 1931, attended Beloit College, and received his master's degree in photography from the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1959. After spending 18 months in Europe, Mr. Metzker returned to this country, applying to teach at the Philadelphia College of Art. He joined the faculty there in 1962.

"The thing about class with Ray, it was really intense," said photographer David Graham, who first encountered Mr. Metzker as a photography student in 1973 and who is now teaching at the University of the Arts. "He had a sense of humor, but when he was talking about art, talking about photography, he was really, really serious."

Mr. Metzker received more than 47 one-person museum exhibitions and more than 45 institutions hold his work in their collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is the winner of two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Metzker is survived by a brother. Plans for a memorial service are incomplete.

Correction:

The name of Mr. Metzker's wife, Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, was spelled incorrectly in earlier versions of this obituary.

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