A Modernist’s Challenge to Instant Gratification

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We live in an age of instant gratification. Our news is delivered as it happens, our musings “liked” before our eyes. Our photographs pop up on the back of our cameras â€" or online â€" moments after clicking the shutter.

Whatever happened to slow and steady wins the race? Culture being cyclical, might there be an adjustment just around the bend? Anne Wilkes Tucker, the curator of photography at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, thinks that might not be a bad idea. “I will look seriously at anybody who sustains a serious, diverse career for 50 years doing anything,” she said. “I don’t care if they’re a car mechanic. There’s something for all of us to learn from anybody who is focused and has a serious intellectual engagement with whatever it is they’re doing.”

Take, for example, the life and career of the Modernist photographer Ray K. Metzker, whose work Ms. Tucker curated for an extensive 1984 retrospective in Houston. Almost 30 years later, he appears to be making a late-career comeback.

Mr. Mezker, who was born in 1931, made sumptuous, formal, humanistic photographs over five decades, moving from one project to the next as his creativity demanded. This year, his work is featured in a traveling exhibition that opens in September at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle, having just been shown at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. He also has a show of vintage prints at the Andrew Smith Gallery in Santa Fe this summer.

His work, like that of his Modernist colleagues, fell out of favor when the world embraced Pop and Post-Modernism. The latter movement has dominated the headlines for decades, with its championing of artists of all races and genders, techniques like appropriation and mashups, and an emphasis on socio-political critique. Andy Warhol’s idea about everyone being famous for 15 minutes might encapsulate our social media world, but Mr. Metzker and his fellow Modernists, who emphasized craftsmanship, subtlety, and patient engagement, might still have something to teach us.

Ray K. Metzker Philadelphia, 1964.

Mr. Metzker was raised in Milwaukee and began his photo career at his school newspaper. He studied photography at Beloit College, and worked as a photo instructor for the military during the Korean War, before moving to Chicago in 1956 for graduate study at the Institute of Design. There he worked under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, two important Modernist artists.

Like his mentors, Mr. Metzker photographed in black-and-white, and drew critical attention with his graduate thesis project “My Camera and I in the Loop,” shot in downtown Chicago. (Ten images were subsequently purchased by Edward Steichen for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.) Though the ID helped its students develop commercial careers, Mr. Metzker began to see his photography more as a method of personal expression. In his statement about the Loop project, he wrote, “I wanted to photograph and the Loop was the reason.”

His initial forays into fine art photography were odes to the mystery of light and shadow in the urban environment; lone figures and rounded cars dominate. His photographs from the 1950s and early ’60s have much in common with the work of Mr. Callahan, and the influence of W. Eugene Smith and Walker Evans also can be seen. The pictures resemble those of Mr. Metzker’s contemporary, Robert Frank, though they lack the penetrating criticality of American society.

The transition from straight, ’50s culture to the radical, revolutionary ’60s was neither graceful nor gradual. Experimentation, rebellion and upheaval were in the air, and the arts were no exception. Sober Modernist painters like Mark Rothko gave way to Pop upstarts like Mr. Warhol. Mr. Metzker, however, managed to capture the vitality of the times his way.

In 1964, he began his “Composite” series, for which he was awarded the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships. The series was a jarring innovation, harnessing the power of serial imagery and condensing it. He assembled previously shot photographs into intricately crafted, multiple-image grids where the same photo was repeated, but printed differently. In his Guggenheim application, Mr. Metzker said, “The entire idea comes to me as a unique way of seeing, as if new eyes replaced the old.” Shortly thereafter, he began to create “Composites” by treating an entire roll of film as a single concept to be arranged into a carefully constructed photographic wall sculpture.

Ray K. Metzker “Composites: Nude,” 1966.

From a contemporary perspective, the difference between images like one shot in Philadelphia in 1963 (Slide 1), and “Composites: Nude” (right) made three later, is startling. While the former style may resemble the work of other photographers, the latter is genuinely new and important within the history of photography. Keith Davis, the curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins museum, who curated the current traveling retrospective, said, “If we had to boil Ray down to one body of work, and I don’t want to do that, but if we had to, the ‘Composites’ would be the great art historical achievement.”

Though he supported himself over the years through teaching, Mr. Metzker was well-placed to take advantage of the burgeoning market for fine art photography as it developed in the ’70s. Ultimately, he was able to stop teaching and live on print sales. According to Mr. Davis, though, the fact that his formative years occurred before the possibility of a serious payday was key to his artistic evolution.

That may also be crucial to the renewed appreciation of Mr. Metzker and his Modernist contemporaries. Though much is to be respected about the manner in which Post-Modernism opened the door for all artists to have a place at the table, the Modernists left a legacy of doing the work for the “right” reasons. The pictures were made as the result of an idealistic journey on the creative path, not as products to be cranked out for an insatiable market.

The artists of Ray K. Metzker’s generation believed the work was its own reward, and strove to build lives that would enable sustained creation over time. In fact, he continued to work seriously until 2007, making sure to move on to a new project when he grew bored with the previous one. He refused to repeat himself for the sake of giving collectors what they wanted.

That seems to be the lesson to take from Mr. Metzker’s long career, and perhaps from Modernism as well. Instant gratification might not necessarily be a good thing, and we could all do with a bit more patience. “If people will give it the time, they’ll find things that speak to them,” said Ms. Tucker. “There is meat on these bones. It challenges and engages us. God knows it’s not the social media world. And that’s maybe its biggest handicap. It’s work that takes time.”

Ray K. Metzker Albuquerque, 1972.

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