Earthly Delights

Ray K. Metzker's Earthly Delights catalogs a body of close, dense black-and-white studies of foliage and undergrowth, a quieter register from a photographer best known for stark urban abstraction.

Produced for Metzker's exhibition at Laurence Miller Gallery in New York, on view October 19 through December 3, 1988, the catalog reproduces ten black-and-white photographs from the Earthly Delights series, made in the eastern United States, alongside an introduction by Tom Goodman, brief biographical notes, a list of Metzker's previous exhibitions, and a list of public collections holding his work. It is a modest, stapled wrappers publication rather than a full monograph, sized to accompany the gallery show.

Metzker studied at Chicago's Institute of Design under Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan and spent his career pushing photographic technique toward abstraction, through multiple exposures, composite prints, and dense tonal fields. The Earthly Delights series was later folded into Ray K. Metzker: Landscapes, Aperture's 2000 retrospective of his landscape work, situating these close-up studies within his broader engagement with the American landscape.