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from Laurence Miller Gallery website: Ray K. Metzker quietly made extraordinary and influential photographs over the course of a five decade career. Today, he is recognized as one of the great masters of American photography, a virtuoso who pursued his chosen medium passionately throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st. Metzker was born in 1931 in Milwaukee and attended the Institute of Design, Chicago--a renowned school that had a few years earlier been dubbed the New Bauhaus-- from 1956 to 1959. He was thus an heir to the avant-garde photography that had developed in Europe in the 1920's. Early in his career, his work was marked by unusual intensity. Composites, multiple-exposure, superimposition of negatives, juxtapositions of two images, solarization and other formal means were part and parcel of his vocabulary. He was committed to discovering the potential of black and white photography during the shooting and the printing, and has shown consummate skill in each stage of the photographic process. Ray Metzker's unique and continually evolving mastery of light, shadow, and line transform the ordinary into a realm of pure visual delight.