Couplets-Atlantic City, Ray Krueger Metzker

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.