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. Born in Brooklyn, she attended Pratt Institute, where she majored in Visual Communications, and was then hired by Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising agency as its first female art director. She took pictures all the while, amassing them slowly over the next thirteen years, while raising five children. One of these photographs was included in a famous and controversial exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art – Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 – and became the dark horse hit of the exhibition. Gallery shows and commercial clients soon followed. Her first commercial client was Valentino, followed by Elizabeth Arden, Perry Ellis, Shiseido, Fendi, Saks Fifth Avenue, Paloma Picasso, Victoria’s Secret, Revlon, and in recent years Levi’s, Ralph Lauren, Club Monaco, Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus.

Sheila’s fine art photographs are featured in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The International Center of Photography, The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Chrysler Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, Agfa and Polaroid Corporations, Saks Fifth Avenue, as well as many personal collections. She has published five monographs: Objects of Desire, which won the American Society of Magazine Photographers Ansel Adams Award for Book Photography; Sheila Metzner’s Color; Inherit the Earth, a collection of landscapes shot during her travels, Form and Fashion, a collection of images culled from twenty years of her work in fine-art and fashion, and Sheila Metzner: From Life in 2017. (source:sheilametzner.com)

From 1998 to 2003, fine press photography book publisher 21st Editions released 6 volumes of The Journal of Contemporary Photography featuring hand-pulled photogravure images from an international group of contemporary photographers. The photogravures are made by Jon Goodman. The images are combined with criticism, poetry, and fiction from acclaimed writers. The project aimed, successfully or not, to create a contemporary version of Stieglitz’s celebrated Camera Work.

This image is from Volume II which contains original essays by France’s leading novelist Michel Tournier; philosopher Frederick Turner; award-winning photographic historian Lee Fontanella; novelist and playwright Elizabeth Dewberry; novelist and Josh Russell; The photographers featured in tthis volume include Adam Fuss, Jaume Blassi, Bill Jacobson, Joyce Tenneson, Kenro Izu, Vik Muniz, Cy DeCosse, John Dugdale, Tom Baril, Joan Fonteuberta, Arthur Tress, Robert ParkeHarrison, and Sheila Metzner.