Une ressource audio authentique : l’interview de Keith F. Davis, spécialiste du photographe américain Ray K. Metzker

Le Centre Photographique de Rouen Normandie présente jusqu’en janvier 2026 une exposition monographique consacrée au photographe américain Ray K. Metzker (1931-2014), intitulée “obscurités radieuses”.
A cette occasion, le spécialiste américain de ce photographe, ancien conservateur et commissaire d’exposition au musée Nelson-Atkins de Kansas City, Keith F. Davis, nous a accordé un entretien pour replacer le travail de Metzker dans son contexte américain.

L’interview étant riche et les propos développés, les parties en gras peuvent être extraites du document et utilisées comme « citations » en fonction du niveau des élèves et des objectifs visés. La ressource a pour vocation à faire l’objet d’une compréhension orale.

Les trois photographies sont utilisables dans le strict cadre de la classe.

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963 © Estate of Ray K. Metzker / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

[1] Could you introduce yourself and tell us what the job of a curator consists in ?

Well, I’m Keith F. Davis. I’m retired now, but have a 50 year or so career as a photographic historian and curator and writer. But the job of a curator involves understanding the history of the medium, understanding the individual works or trying to, having a sympathy for a great broad range of work, not being too narrow, you need to have pretty broad interests. And then with some ability to communicate to a larger public why what you think is important is important. So it’s a matter of specialized knowledge, hopefully as broad as possible and an ability to communicate that in writing and you know, in lecturing and in the exhibitions one puts together. So it’s a fun challenge for sure.

[2] Could you tell us who Ray K. Metzker and what he is famous for ?

Ray was born in 1931, if I remember correctly, and died in 2014. He was one of the greatest American modernist photographers. And by that, I mean, he came of age in the mid to late 1950s and continued doing excellent work up until about 2010. His aesthetic was certainly formed in the 50s and 60s with the education he received at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where his teachers were Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. So the ID in Chicago is a legendary program and Ray was one of the key early students who got his graduate degree at the ID. Ray embraces both the nature of photography itself - he’s a black and white photographer, he loved monochrome, he never saw that as a minus compared to color. He saw that as a plus, in fact, because monochrome makes the real world a bit more mysterious and is explicitly about light and structure, light and form. And that’s exactly what Ray was all about. But that said, Metzker had an incredible imagination and curiosity about both the process and the world. So his earliest work is done in Chicago : street views and multiple exposures in Chicago where he was studying. Then he goes to Europe for a year and a half…not vacation really…but a coming of age tour ; does really good work there. He comes back to the US and begins teaching in Philadelphia in the early 1960s and remains in Philadelphia through the end of his life.

Ray K. Metzker, Chicago, Loop, 1958 © Estate of Ray K. Metzker / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

[3] How did the “composites” come about ?

In Philadelphia he continues with street work, but then he gets the idea of the composites, which are these big constructed images and image constructed from many small pictures. So it’s almost like a quilt, if you will. From a distance, you see a texture and a pattern ; from close up, you read each part as a documentary picture. But then he experimented with double frame images, other multiple exposures, images in and out of focus. He began a wonderful series of landscapes in the early 1980s that are characteristically him, where he’s making landscape pictures, but with a shallow depth of field, so focus becomes a big issue in those landscape pictures. And they become almost like photograms or a combination of a photogram sensibility, that is a cameraless image sensibility with a traditional landscape sensibility. So he’s by using focus in that imaginative way, he’s really energizing what many would think to be a very calm and settled kind of subject. Then later, his later work, he returns to Philadelphia, he does cameraless images, more constructed images, etc. So the range of his work is wonderful and pretty special. There are very few other photographers to my mind who have been that good at that kind of range of approaches.

[4] Did he have a characteristic style and if so what would it be ?

Well, given the complexity, I would say that his continuing interest was in light and structure, light and form, explored in various ways. He was unusually experimental. The big composites that he was doing in the mid 1960s were unprecedented. They were incredibly ambitious, incredibly large in scale, incredibly complicated, compared to anything the photography world had seen till that time. The ‘Pictus Interruptus’ pictures he was doing in the 70s, where he holds some kind of form very close to the lands and then focuses on the landscape behind were radically disorienting and then that carries over in somewhat softer form into the landscapes. So he always respected what the medium was about. He never used a computer, never used Photoshop, and so forth. But given all that, he was relentless in his quest to find out the variety of things he could do with the medium.

[5] Metzker’s photographs often focus on urban spaces, in the exhibition there will be a focus on Chicago and Philadelphia. How does his work reflect the relationship between individuals and their environment in modern cities ?

Well, yeah, he loves cities as, on one level, he loved them as light modulators, that is as environments in which the light was shaped in particular ways because of tall buildings, casting big shadows, and then you get rays of sunlight coming through people walking through these patterns of shadow and light. So he loved the formal aspect of what a city was about but he also embraced the psychological aspect to of individual people, solitary people, that we can imagine are every bit like us, you know, exactly like us, that are going about their daily lives or lonely or happy in their own particular ways. So even given his formalism, Ray was a fascinating kind of humanist. He was interested in the psychological feeling of being in a big tough bustling city.

Ray K. Metzker, City Whispers, Philadelphia, 1981 © Estate of Ray K. Metzker / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

[6] Did the urban changes happening around him contribute to this will to be experimental ? Were his experimentations a result of the modern city of the 50s or (and) the result of other factors ? I had in mind a two-year long work on the Loop in Chicago at the end of the 50s.

Yeah, of course, when he’s in Chicago, Chicago was a pretty, I just, I just was in Chicago just last week as a matter of fact, and it has changed tremendously from the 1950s. So in the 1950s, it was a tougher, grittier city. The pictures we see of it are in black and white. Of course, the reality wasn’t black and white, but that’s our feeling about it. But it was a tougher, grittier place. And some of that comes through in Ray’s pictures, although he always seeks to make that experience singular and elegant. And he reduces it to its primal or primary kind of forms in a fascinating way. So the nature of Chicago as a big bustling city, the nature of Philadelphia as a much older city with narrower streets, a more intimate kind of space. The difference between Chicago and Philadelphia is fascinating actually. The streets in Chicago were much wider. The streets in Philadelphia, downtown, are much narrower. So you’re closer to the buildings and the people on the opposite sidewalk in Philadelphia. He embraced all of that. So he was interested in the play of humanity on the stage set of these various cities as revealed by the play of light.

[7] How influential has he been ?

It’s been very significant Ray was quiet. He was not a self promoter, but people knew the work He had a one man exhibition at the Museum of Monternard in the late 70s. He taught for many years, so his students certainly knew the work exhibited widely. So the pictures were seen, even if the depth of his creation wasn’t perhaps as well known as it should have been. One of the things I’ve learned from years of going through the archive is how relentless a worker he was. He was making really good pictures all the time. And for everyone known picture from early Philadelphia or later, you know, the landscapes, there’s 15 others that people haven’t seen before. So he had an incredible work ethic. Yeah, his influence, I think, is very strong among those who value that sort of modernist history, a love of the black and white print, the craftsmanship to make the beautiful prints that he made. And he was an amazing traditional craftsman. His prints are never accidental. He was very precise in how he made those prints, how dark they are, how dark the shadows are, how bright the highlights are, how much you see. All of that was very deliberate. So he’s really, you know, in the very, very top rank of key traditionally modernist figures from the late 50s through the end of the century for sure.

[8] How do you think he would have viewed the relation to the image in the 21 st century ?

Well, he photographed up until 2009 or 10, I want to say, and never made the switch to digital capture as far as I know. Everything I’ve seen is from film negatives, so he was comfortable with what he knew. He didn’t feel any need to change just because the new technologies were available. At the same time, he made collages. He made cameraless images. So he loved the object quality of the silver print. The inkjet print that you get from digital capture has a different surface, a different depth, a different kind of quality. And he loved the silveriness of the black and white silver print. He also just never embraced color. He thought and black and white and he saw in black and white. So, I mean, you, you can shoot digital and flip it to black and white as we know. So I don’t know. He was never against new technologies, never, but he, but he had a sense, he had a powerful sense of what interested him and the ways he could explore those interests. So I wouldn’t have ruled anything out, but to my knowledge, he didn’t do anything with digital capture, except I don’t know, maybe family pictures, perhaps. I’m not sure.

[9] He taught photography. Was this important in his life and in his practice ?

Yes. I think he really did enjoy teaching. He took it very seriously, so it wasn’t easy. He was a good teacher, but he was a tough teacher. He didn’t sugarcoat his opinions. Even though he was a quiet personality, he had strong views and never said something just to be nice as far as I know. But he was a constructive teacher. When he began making enough money from selling prints, he retired from teaching. This was in the early 1980s. So I think pretty clearly he valued being an artist more than being a teacher because that’s the decision he made, which I think all of us could at least understand. So I mean, given that fact, I’d say that he taught in order to survive as an artist. And once he could survive as an artist, that’s what he did.

[10] You wrote a book about him. How did that come about ?

Well, I’ve always admired the work. I mean, beginning in the early 1970s, when I began following, you know, current trends and so forth. My first visit with Ray was probably 1983 or four, when he lived in an old firehouse in Philadelphia. in Philadelphia. But then in the 2008-09 period, probably, I began to think more seriously about doing something in depth with Metzger’s work. I’d previously acquired, I don’t know, 15 or 18 prints for the collections that I oversaw. Larry Miller, his dealer, encouraged me to come and look at the archive. And when I did, I was just astonished. I was just incredibly impressed. The depth of the work, the quality of the prints, it made it clear that there was a project to be done. So I thought there was an opportunity. Our show, I think, opened in 2012 at the Nelson Act as Museum in Kansas City. I was working on a book, but sidetracked by something else, we ended up doing the book for that project in 2012 because that show traveled to the Getty in California. So I had intended to do the book, we had Ray out to talk at the museum. He and I did a conversation on stage that was wonderful. I mean, Ray was completely articulate and just a great personality. Sadly, that turns out to have been the last public event he did. He had a stroke not too long after that.

[11] How should the viewers approach his work ?

I would just encourage viewers to look carefully at the prints to appreciate his craftsmanship, his love of the materials. His work really does demonstrate to me a deep affection for what the camera does. At the same time he chose subjects of importance to him. Chicago meant something to him, personally and emotionally, Philadelphia meant something to him. The freshness, the ambiance of the landscape really meant something to him when he began that work in the early 1980s. In his work we have this wonderful coming together of the love of the medium, a high, high, high level of craft and experience, and an embrace of various aspects of the world that is profound, is really memorable and profound. Taken as a whole, I think, that the body of work is really a monument to the beauty and the integrity of being a serious picture maker.

Les liens avec les thématiques culturelles des programmes

Les liens avec les thématiques culturelles des programmes sont les suivants :

• 6è - Pays et paysages
• Cycle 4 - Voyages et migrations / Rencontres avec d’autres cultures
• 2nde - Le passé dans le présent / Créer et recréer
• 1ère - Art et pouvoir
• Terminale - Espace privé et espace public / Territoire et mémoire / Fiction et réalité

• Spécialités :
   LLCER - 1ère - Imaginaire : Utopies et dystopies / Imagination créatrice et visionnaire
   LLCER - Terminale - Voyages, territoires, frontières : Ancrage et héritage
   LLCER - Terminale- Arts et débats d’idées : L’art qui fait débat
   AMC - 1ère - Savoirs, création, innovation : Science et technique, promesses et défis
   AMC - Terminale - Environnements en mutation : Repenser la ville
   AMC - Terminale - Relation au monde : Héritage commun et diversité

Conclusion

L’article proposé s’inscrit dans une dynamique de projets culturels développée dans l’Académie de Normandie. Les ressources proposées par M. Locoge visent à initier l’exploration de nouveaux thèmes culturels au sein des classes grâce à l’utilisation de nouveaux documents, la variété des thématiques abordées permettant en effet d’enrichir la compétence culturelle des élèves.

Pour aller plus loin :

https://centrephotographique.com/metzker/
https://www.nelson-atkins.org/art/exhibitions/the-photographs-of-ray-k-metzker/
https://www.lesdoucheslagalerie.com/artists/2218-ray-k.-metzker/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Metzker
https://www.moma.org/artists/3948-ray-k-metzker

Contact pour les projets éducatifs du Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie (au 01/11/2025) :
Yvan Lebocey
T. : +33 (0)6 66 60 86 18
education@centrephotographique.com
https://centrephotographique.com/