As far as I know, very often overlooked in the canon of American photography is Ray Metzker, and I suggest seeing his work whenever you have a chance b/c he takes the formal conventions of photography to their maximum.  In effect, through such things as double exposures, cropping, or something as simple as displaying in diptychs, he takes every day realities and creates new realities – and not in the simple Winogrand sense of photographing things to “see what they look like photographed,” but in a more deep, controlled, and impressionistic sense of transforming things in an act of creating truths.

Making work that is autotelic like this is something…well, let’s just say it’s not exactly the style of the moment; that is, creating with politics that refuse conventional politics/content – and it’ll have trouble ever becoming fashionable b/c in a way it is something that has to be done in silence, and silence, needless to say, doesn’t sell.  To be clear, I don’t write here thinking in terms of the old Romantic vain of l’art pour l’art, but I mean something in the post-post-modernly sense of, say, the “inaesthetics” of Alain Badiou, were art can be “immenent” and not mimesis (see his text, The Handbook of Inaesthetics).  Though, stubbornly, I’m still grappling with the mathematical and inhuman definitions of art in Badiou’s approach, but that is another discussion for another time.

Philadelphia, 1963. © Ray Metzker.

Pictus Interruptus, 1977. © Ray Metzker