An artist, and a friend, of importance

By Tom Goodman

Innovator. Formalist. Intellectual searcher. Legatee of the American Bauhaus.

Ray Metzker, who passed away Oct. 9 at the age of 83, has been called all of the above.

These labels are accurate, but incomplete.

Ray, who was my mentor in graduate school and my friend and colleague after that, was one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century and the first decade of this one. Despite the often brooding, mysterious, intense, and precise nature of much of his work, he had a whimsical, playful side to him as well. Light dances. Lines pulsate. His titles, never programmatic or literal, could be jazzy.

Take the last important body of work he completed, images of reflections in car windshields and bodies, executed as late as 2009. These summarized the qualities that set Metzker apart and defined his legacy: curiosity, an eye for the ordinary, and a resultant extraordinary vision in bold black and white. He could see in layers, combinations, simultaneity. Like the late modernist he was, he learned the lessons not only of photography but of art in general, distilled them, and synthesized his own take. He understood that photographs were objects themselves and went about rethinking how they could be realized, how they could appear.

Metzker was never a star. He wasn't even particularly famous for most of his career. When I would tell people I had studied with him, they invariably would say, "Oh, yes, the photographer who did the composites." These were clearly his breakthrough pieces, the ones that established him as a formidable figure. Not satisfied with the single image, Metzker explored multiple images, assembled or printed as uncut rolls of film, rhythmic and pulsating and dazzling. They were also quite large in many cases, well before the current era of huge prints, many of which are large simply because it is possible, not because the vision demanded it, as was the case with Metzker. The multiples were, ironically, predominantly one-of-a-kinds, another challenge to the notion that the photograph was endlessly reproducible.

His studio walls were covered with found objects, many of which did not make it into his work but clearly influenced it. He was a flaneur. After graduate school and a stint in the military, he traveled in Europe for nearly a year, taking walks and pictures, developing his film in makeshift "darkrooms" in pensions. When I asked him how he would work during that sojourn, he said simply, "One day I would walk out the door and turn to the left; the next day I would turn to the right."

As arbitrary as that sounded, I realized later that he always carried what he called "terms" with him. Some thing or quality of light or forms had caught his attention on one of his walks and he went out the next day with these in mind. He didn't have a specific picture in mind, just these qualities that made pictures worth taking - and looking at. This approach was the key to what made Metzker an artist of importance and what made his work challenging. He understood that the artist begins his exploration by admitting what he doesn't know. Then he sets out to try and discover the meanings.