Ray K. Metzker (1931–2014) was a major yet discreet figure in American photography in the second half of the twentieth century. The author of a body of work that stood out from its beginnings in the 1950s for its experimental nature, he was quickly and widely exhibited in the United States. Yet his work remains, even today, little known in Europe. Obscurités radieuses (Radiant Darknesses) is the photographer’s first institutional exhibition in France.

With some fifty prints, the exhibition offers a journey through Ray K. Metzker’s work, viewed from the perspective of experimentation, from the 1950s to the 1990s, from Chicago to Philadelphia, via Europe. Trained in the late 1950s at the Institute of Design in Chicago, he received an education strongly influenced by the spirit of the European avant-garde. These artistic movements accorded photography a plastic depth that it was up to the photographer to explore with passion, from the act of taking the picture to the interpretation of the negative in the laboratory.

Although the vast majority of his explorations take the modern city and its signs as their raw material, Ray K. Metzker does not pound the pavement like a street photographer, hunting for incongruous scenes or particular physiognomies. The perimeter of the city, a neighbourhood, a pavement, becomes the site of a secret conversation between the photographer and his camera. ‘Discontented with the single, fixed frame image (the isolated moment), my work has moved into something of the composite, of collected and related moments.’ He decides to respond to the jerky tempo of the city, its density, even its chaos, with repetition, superimposition, double exposure and montage. More than just attractive formal exercises, these photographs, in deep blacks and sunny whites, bear witness to an artist’s life devoted to seeking the photograph, the one that can capture the immense experience of the gaze in this modest rectangle.

In partnership with Les Douches la Galerie, Paris.