Ray K. Metzker completed his graduate studies in 1959 at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago where he studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. His earliest photographs from this time demonstrate the artist's abiding interest in technical experimentation and formal invention, traits indicative of the Bauhaus tradition to which Metzker belongs. In 1962, the artist moved to Philadelphia, where he lives and works today, and immediately began photographing his new urban environment.
In 2000, the Philadelphia Museum of Art presented a retrospective of Ray Metzker’s landscape series from the 1980s and '90s. In 2007-08, a museum retrospective was organized at the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland and the Preus Fotomuseum, Norway. Museum collections include the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; The Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, France, among others.
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