Composites: Philadelphia

For over fifty years, Ray Metzker has made innovations in photographic form with a meticulous graphic sensibility. A student of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at Chicago’s Institute of Design, Metzker had his first one-man show at the Art Institute in 1959, which exhibited his master’s thesis, “My Camera and I in the Loop.” In the mid-1960s, he became frustrated with the limitations of the single image, and began his Composites as a way to explore, as he wrote, “complexity of succession and simultaneity, of collected and related moments.” Influenced in part by Eadweard Muybridge’s gridded motion studies, he printed multiple images in careful graphic sequences. In Composites: Philadelphia, Metzker employed an entire roll of film, rewinding and reshooting (and thus double-exposing) the backlit nude silhouette to produce a work that relates images to one another across time.