Press Release
Ray K. Metzker: “Film Noir”
May 6 – September 8, 2023
Galería Alta is honored to present an exhibition of Ray K. Metzker, one of the great masters of American Photography.
A selection of black and white vintage prints will shine and dialog with the inhabited space of the gallery.
By appointment only.
Metzker (1931-2014), graduated at the Institute of Design, Chicago, in 1959, a school referred to as the New Bauhaus, where he studied with fellow modernist photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind.
Ray’s work pushed the boundaries of what seemed formally possible in black and white photography and pioneered a new an entirely personal visual synthesis of formal elegance, technical precision and optical innovation. He is recognized as a virtuoso and a master of light.
Metzker’s devotion to photographic seeing as a process of discovery is also deeply humanistic in its illumination of isolation and vulnerability.
MoMA, New York, organized Metzker’s first solo exhibition in 1967.
Major retrospectives of Metzker’s work were organized by the International Center of Photography in NY in in 1978, by the Museum of fine Arts in Houston in 1984 and by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City in 2011.
In a career that spanned five decades, Metzker received all the honors possible in his field and is represented in major museums worldwide.
