I have been looking at these photographs for over a month now. I’m not certain why but they draw me in and I keep coming back to them. They hold me. And by hold I’m thinking of what Roland Barthes may have been suggesting when, talking about another photograph, he says, “Bob Wilson holds me, but I cannot say why…” (1) That’s the exact feeling I get when I’m looking at these images Ray K. Metzker.
Inkjet reproductions rest on my bedside table. I have not known what to say about them or what exactly they might be saying to me. Something about extremes. Something about sidewalks and saturated shadows. Something about walking in, toward, and around. Something about fracturing, dancing apart, even. But there is also something about play, something wonderfully naïve about them, as if they were taken with the eye of a child. But there is more. After the child grows up he discovers the long-forgotten roll of film and develops it. But now, with more life behind him, the process of developing them results in something darker, heavier.
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