Couplets-Atlantic City, Ray Krueger Metzker

Artwork Overview

Ray Krueger Metzker, Couplets-Atlantic City
Ray Krueger Metzker, Couplets-Atlantic City
Ray Krueger Metzker
Couplets-Atlantic City
1968
Ray Krueger Metzker
1931–2014
Couplets-Atlantic City, 1968
Where object was made: United States
Material/technique: gelatin silver print
Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 22.9 x 15.7 cm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 9 1/2 x 6 3/16 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 19 x 14 in
Credit line: Museum purchase: Peter T. Bohan Art Acquisition Fund
Accession number: 1987.0254
Not on display
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Archive Label: Interested in what happens by chance in the course of exposing a roll of film, Metzker made this photograph by printing two adjoining negatives as a single image. In this way he juxtaposed two shots made at a beach at Atlantic City, New Jersey. The surrounding black frame flattens the two images into a single plane, so that the bodies seem to float, hovering like a cloud above the earth. By printing the two negatives together, Metzker produced an image that defies our expectations that the body will be oriented to the ground and that a normal gravitational field will exert itself. Within the context of the late 1960s, the bodies and their orientation can be read symbolically, for they refuse to obey rules (of gravity and perspective) and act according to their own wishes and desires.