Ray K. Metzker’s 59 AF-1, Chicago, 1959 is less a document than an X‑ray of the city’s nervous system.

Twenty‑five separate exposures, each a photograph of something unfolding around a stairway ascending through light and shadow, are pressed into a single, square frame.

The steps become a kind of visual metronome: with every new exposure another event, another posture, another tilt of light is added to the beat.

Blacks and whites tighten around these repetitions, compressing downtown Chicago into a field where architecture, bodies, and stair treads share the same charged pulse. What begins as a street scene turns into visual thought, a test of how much intensity one frame can bear.

Nothing in the photograph relaxes. Angled shadows thrust diagonally across the rising stairs, echoing the hard geometry of railings, façades, and the cropped planes of passing figures, so that location and movement seem carved from the same material.

The twenty‑fivefold exposure folds time into rhythm; figures register less as individuals than as notes struck again and again, their spacing and overlap giving the image a distinctly musical visual effect, like a chord held under pressure.

Metzker, steeped in the experimental ethos of the Institute of Design, distrusts easy hierarchies: foreground and background collide, pattern rubs against narrative, and seeing becomes strenuous, almost percussive.

Within this pressure, 59 AF-1, Chicago anticipates the radical logic of his later composites: fragmentation, accumulation, the conviction that no single instant is sufficient.

The photograph hovers between legible street image and near‑abstraction, between a particular stairway in Chicago and the timeless drama of bodies climbing through hard light. It leaves the viewer in a charged interval where vision feels syncopated—sharpened, estranged, and fiercely alive.