For nearly 70 years, Ray Metzker has been taking pictures.
He has headed out onto the city streets, Leicas slung over his shoulder, and hunted, a shooter aiming to capture images, not game.
Tens of thousands of pictures later, this unassuming man, one of the most celebrated photographers alive, has hung up the cameras, packed away the lenses, folded and stored the tripods.
His last series of images, taken in 2009 in Philadelphia, where he has lived since 1962, forms a chunk of an exhibition currently on view at the Locks Gallery, 600 Washington Square South, through next Saturday.
"This is great and lasting work - the very best of a classic form of American modernism," Keith F. Davis, senior curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., said before a Metzker show opened there this year.
"Metzker has led a life of deep devotion to understanding the potential, challenge, and pleasure of photographic seeing."
The 35 images that make up the Locks Gallery show are drawn from the full range of Metzker's career, the earliest coming from 1957: an older woman, dressed in black, almost nunlike, walking next to a wall, lights puncturing the deep blacks of the overall scene, like bomblets.
"I'm walking down the street and I see something and I make the exposure, I capture the image and then when I see the proof sheets, certain images look to me to be successful," said Metzker, now 80, gazing at the photo he made half a century ago. A very matter-of-fact man.
He thinks for a moment.
"I proceed from there."
Another work, a famous image, shows a sailor in whites carrying a white duffel and walking down a sidewalk. A deep black shadow obscures the wall behind and in front of him. In fact, the sailor looks as though he is about to be devoured by black.
The image, from 1963, almost instills fear in a viewer. No! Don't walk any farther!
The depth of the blackness - Metzker's work has not infrequently been described as "noirish" - and the brilliant white in this 1970 print - are products of the darkroom, juxtapositions that Metzker extracted under the red light using chemical solutions.
"Oh yes," he said, peering at the sailor on the verge of obliteration. "That's pretty contrasty."
