Artist, Ray Metzker: The big question always is: what is he doing? Or: what is the work about? And maybe on one hand, the obvious is, “Oh, he’s interested in cities.” But this is a real departure.
Narrator: That’s the artist Ray Metzker speaking 1991.
Metzker called himself an "intellectual wanderer," often walking around cities and making photographs of what he saw. But in the late 1960s, he began creating works that explored a different type of public space: beaches.
Ray Metzker: Working in the city, that was lots of alien features and distant features. And when I went to the beach and was experiencing this proximity to other people as they were relaxing, it was like walking into their home when they're unguarded.
That's when I start using intimacy; there's something intimate about that experience. I just had to keep going back to it. How close can you get? What can you see? What can you, in a sense, touch?
That beginning to look to people, to relate to people, to try and move in closer to people than I'd really done ever before—something opens up.
Archival audio from: Oral history interview with Ray Metzker, 1991 Apr. 30. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.