LAUSANNE.- Musée de l'Elysée presents Ray K. Metzker Rétrospective, on view through January 6, 2008. Ray K. Metzker is recognized as one of the great masters of American photography, a virtuoso who has pursued his chosen medium passionately for fifty years. Even early in his career, Metzker's work was marked by unusual intensity. Drawing inspiration from the things around him, he was acutely perceptive in any environment. This retrospective at the Musée de l'Elysée reveals the full extent of a body of work still relatively unknown from the European public. Over 200 vintage prints are being shown in Europe for the first time. The exhibition, which also provides the opportunity to take stock of the historical significance of Metzker's work, was organized in close collaboration with the photographer himself and the Laurence Miller Gallery in New York.

Major American museums began showing an interest in Metzker's work in the 1960s. Cementing his reputation as a master photographer, the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him his first big one-man show in 1967. Retrospectives were organized in 1978 by the International Center of Photography in New York, and, in 1984, by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The Houston exhibit was subsequently shown in several other major American cities. Metzker himself has lost none of his enthusiasm for photography, which he continues to explore full force.

Born in 1931 in Milwaukee (Wisconsin), Ray K. Metzker attended the Institute of Design, Chicago - a renowned school that had a few years earlier been dubbed the New Bauhaus - from 1956 to 1959. He was thus an heir to the avant-garde photography that had developed in Europe in the 1920s. Composites, multiple-exposure, superposition of negatives, juxtaposition of two images, solarization and other formal means were part and parcel of Metzker's vocabulary. Since his youth, Metzker was committed to discovering the potential of black and white photography during the shooting and the printing. He has shown consummate skill in each stage of the photographic process.

A catalogue, published by Steidl, with essays by William A. Ewing and Nathalie Herschdorfer, will be available in English or French early 2008.