Somewhere in the 1960s, photographer Ray K. Metzker had the brilliant idea to treat an entire film reel as a single negative. Whether he ever realized this idea remains uncertain, but his Composites can be seen as its prelude. These works are constructed from multiple smaller negatives, arranged within a grid.
Laurence Miller Gallery – Photo of the Week #170
Metzker studied at the Institute of Design (New Bauhaus), where the focus lay on graphic order, form, and the construction of structure. These principles deeply informed his practice. In his street scenes, organized within the grid, he created graphic planes and rhythmic repetitions. The photographic image thus became abstract; it transformed into a pattern.
In interviews and recollections, Metzker described his process of working with multiple exposures as one of constant arranging and rearranging. It was not mere documentation, but rather the weaving of a visual text in which meaning and form strengthen one another.
In Andy Warhol’s work, the use of the grid has a different origin. His early repetitions were the result of a mechanical process that deliberately minimized the artist’s hand, yet still produced a form of abstraction; a visual rhythm, a pattern. In his early work he used the grid as a vision to strengthen his artisticmessage.
From 1982 until his death, Warhol revisited the grid in a more tactile, almost craft-based way. His stitched photographs consist of series of 4, 6, or 9 identical silver gelatin prints, sewn together by his assistants using a Bernina sewing machine. He made around 500 of these works. And by doing so the grid was no longer a vision, it nearly became a rigid law.
Whitney Museum of American Art – Self-Portrait (Stitched)
In my own work, I regularly use the grid to grasp the structure of the everyday, the repetition that leads to abstract patterns in the image.