Sheila Metzner

Rebecca, Tiffany Vase, Large Scale Sheila Metzner Photograph

1987

Sheila Metzner’s unique photographic style has positioned her as a contemporary master in the worlds of fine art, fashion, portraiture, still life and landscape photography. Looking at Metzner’s photographs is a captivating experience. Innocent, sensual, and sexual, each photo, regardless of subject, exhibits and elicits deep emotion. It is nearly impossible to just glance at Metzner’s photos; they beg to be studied. She says, “Photography in its most basic form is magic…This image, caught in my trap, my box of darkness, can live. It is eternal, immortal. The child in the image will not age as the living child will.” Sheila Schwartz was born in 1939 to an orthodox Jewish family in a poor section of Brooklyn. While attending the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan (now the High School of Art and Design), she was awarded the Mayor Robert F. Wagner scholarship to the college of her choice. She chose Pratt Institute, where she majored in visual communication. Her fondness for painting and sculpture also led her to study with abstract artists Jack Tworkov and James Brooks. After graduating in 1961, Sheila worked as an assistant to Lou Dorfsman at CBS Network Advertising. Five years later, she was hired by the Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising agency as its first female art director, and in 1968 she met and married director, creative director, and painter Jeffrey Metzner. While pregnant with their first child, she was riding in a cab with her mentor and friend, photographer Aaron Rose, discussing whether or not to give up her career in advertising. “He said, ‘You should be a photographer. You live like an artist. You have a good eye, you’d be good at it.’ ” Metzner started taking pictures, amassing them slowly over the next 13 years, while raising her and Jeffrey’s five children—Raven, Bega, Ruby, Stella and Louie. Jeffrey’s two daughters from a previous marriage, Evyan and Alison, were also a regular part of the family. “When they were really small, I’d be with them during the day, photographing and printing at night. At eight or nine in the evening, when they were all asleep, I’d take a shower to wake up and put on high heels and lipstick, which I wore then, to give me the feeling of being ready to work.” She continues, “My children never interfered. When I couldn’t travel because of them, I would find a place in upstate New York and call it Antarctica or Egypt. I found microcosms.” Nine years later, Metzner had accumulated a box of 22 pictures. One of them, a black-and-white photograph titled “Evyan, Kinderhook Creek,” caught the eye of John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, which he included in his famous and controversial exhibition “Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960.” The New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer loved the picture and soon it became the dark-horse hit of the exhibition. Later that year, Metzner’s first solo show at the Daniel Wolf Gallery in New York drew record crowds. Metzner was now ready to work in color, but not just conventional color. Of her subjects, she once said, “If I use a rose, I want it to be the essential rose—the rose Beauty brought to her father from the Beast’s garden.” Now she aspired to an essential kind of color. “I wanted something that would last. I was looking for Fresson even though I didn’t know they existed.” The Fresson family works outside of Paris and specializes in a labor-intensive four-color “process de charbon” method, which they invented in 1895. Some prints can go up to seven colors, and are pigment prints, the only true archival color print. Metzner is one of just ten American photographers with whom they are willing to work. Fresson prints are the perfect complement to Metzner’s style—soft, sensuous, and grainy, the prints resemble paintings, with a finish which Metzner describes as “a glaze on fine porcelain. The moment I saw the neutral gray,” she adds, “I knew it was perfect.” In 1980 Metzner showed her Fresson color prints at her second solo exhibition at the Daniel Wolf Gallery. This show led to commissioned editorial work for such magazines as Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Rolling Stone. She secured an exclusive contract with Vogue for the next eight years. Metzner considers her portrait of actress Jeanne Moreau for Vanity Fair a turning point in her career. “It gave me a chance to show my work to a broader audience. I wasn’t just producing photographs for the art world.” Of Sheila’s foray into fashion, critic Carol Squiers says, “At a time when fashion photography was caught between sterility and the snapshot, Metzner created a sumptuous vision that stimulated the entire field.” Metzner also started doing commercial photography around this time. Her first client was Valentino, soon to be followed by Bloomingdale’s, Perry Ellis, Revlon, Shiseido, Saks Fifth Avenue, Paloma Picasso, Victoria’s Secret, Levi’s, Ralph Lauren, and fragrances for Chloe and Fendi (the Fendi campaign won a Fragrance Foundation Recognition Award). Her work also appeared on John Mellencamp...

BEYOND DECORUM, CLOSED AND OPEN Series, I am selling each individually. they are pairs of open and closed jackets. I will include the second photo for reference. This listing is just for the open jacket photograph. Vintage C-print on Fuji crystal archive paper. Image size is 40 x 30", sheet measures 50 X 35 Provenance: printed by Muse X, Los Angeles. I believe these were test, proof prints. They are not signed or editioned The work of Nigerian-born Iké Udé...

BEYOND DECORUM, CLOSED AND OPEN Series, I am selling each individually. they are pairs of open and closed jackets. I will include the second photo for reference. This listing is just for the open jacket photograph. Vintage C-print on Fuji crystal archive paper. Image size is 40 x 30", sheet measures 50 X 32 Provenance: printed by Muse X, Los Angeles. I believe these were test, proof prints. They are not signed or editioned The work of Nigerian-born Iké Udé...

BEYOND DECORUM, CLOSED AND OPEN Series, I am selling each individually. they are pairs of open and closed jackets. I will include the second photo for reference. This listing is just for the closed jacket photograph. Vintage C-print on Fuji crystal archive paper. Image size is 40 x 30", sheet measures 50 X 36 Provenance: printed by Muse X, Los Angeles. I believe these were test, proof prints. They are not signed or editioned The work of Nigerian-born Iké Udé...

BEYOND DECORUM, CLOSED AND OPEN Series, I am selling each individually. they are pairs of open and closed jackets. I will include the second photo for reference. This listing is just for the closed jacket photograph. Vintage C-print on Fuji crystal archive paper. Image size is 40 x 30", sheet measures 50 X 32 Provenance: printed by Muse X, Los Angeles. I believe these were test, proof prints. They are not signed or editioned The work of Nigerian-born Iké Udé...

Carol Beckwith, (American, b. 1945), Maasai Portrait Chromogenic print on paper, from Beckwith's book "Maasai" (1980), Hand signed in pencil, dated and titled with name of sitter in margins, 19" x 16" Sheet. Carol Beckwith (1945-) is an American photographer, author, and artist known for her photojournalism documenting the indigenous tribal cultures of Africa, most notably in partnership with the Australian photographer Angela Fisher. Between them, Beckwith and Fisher have published 14 books, and have had their photos appear in National Geographic, Natural History, African Arts, The Observer Magazine, Time, Life, Vogue, Marie Claire and Elle. They continue to exhibit and lecture at galleries and museums worldwide, including The American Museum of Natural History and The Explorers Club in New York City, The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and the Royal Geographical Society in London. They have also collaborated on four films about African traditions. Together they have received numerous accolades, including the United Nations Award for Excellence, the Royal Geographical Society's Cherry Kearton Medal, two Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, The Explorers Club Lowell Thomas Award, and the WINGS WorldQuest Lifetime Achievement Award. Carol Beckwith was born in Boston, Massachusetts, where she went on to attend both the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Goucher College in Maryland. After obtaining her degree in Painting and Photography she won a traveling fellowship from the Boston Museum, which let her travel to other countries for the first time. She spent seven months in Japan, living in a Zen temple and studying calligraphy painting. She continued to travel through Southeast Asia and New Guinea, where she witnessed a "sing-sing", a gathering of 90,000 Highland warriors, in Mount Hagen, and paddled up Chambri Lakes in a canoe, an experience she called "one of the most wonderful, and in a way formative, experiences in my life." Her first trip to Africa was in 1973, when she was invited to spend Christmas with a friend in Kenya. Beckwith bought a 45-day roundtrip ticket and ended up staying eight months. There she encountered the Maasai people who invited her to witness a female circumcision ceremony. Astonished by the ritual, she then determined to spend more time with the Maasai. Beckwith studied photography in college but had initially intended to become a painter. It was during her travels through New Guinea that she realized the advantages of photography, saying that "there was such a vast amount of exciting material that I began to photograph instead, approaching photography with the eye of a painter in terms of light, color, composition. I wanted the images to be multi layered experiences in a way that a painting is. . . [Photography] seemed to be a more suitable medium for the pace of travel." Beckwith's first major collaboration was with Tepilit Ole Saitoti, an anthropologist and former Maasai warrior...

For a limited time only these Slim Aarons prints are available to purchase at 15% discount. Please contact the gallery for any queries. Please bear in mind that all prints are produ...

Please bear in mind that all prints are produced to order. Lead times are expected between 15-20 days. Currency fluctuations may cause the price to change. This is a contemporary pr...

For a limited time only these Slim Aarons prints are available to purchase at 15% discount. Please contact the gallery for any queries. Please bear in mind that all prints are produ...

Please bear in mind that all prints are produced to order. Lead times are expected between 15-20 days. Currency fluctuations may cause the price to change. This is a contemporary pr...

Audrey Hepburn on the set of ‘Two for the Road’, 1966. Audrey Hepburn Swims 1966 by Terry O’Neill
 Hand SIGNED LIMITED EDITION 27/50 PAPER: C TYPE FULLY FRAMED: 26.5 x 21.1 INCH P...

For a limited time only these Slim Aarons prints are available to purchase at 15% discount. Please contact the gallery for any queries. Please bear in mind that all prints are produ...