Sheila Metzner (born 1939) is an American photographer. She was the first female photographer to collaborate with the
Vogue magazine on an ongoing basis. Metzner lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Metzner graduated from the Higher School of Art and Design and the Faculty of Visual Communications of the Pratt Institute. After that, she was engaged in promotional activities. In the 1960s, she became the first woman to be promoted to art director by Doyle Dane Bernbach, an advertising agency. Thanks to this, she successfully collaborated with well-known photographers, including
Richard Avedon,
Melvin Sokolsky,
Bob Richardson and
Diane Arbus.
Inspired by the work of 19th-century English photographer
Julia Margaret Cameron, who painted pictures of her family, Metzner photographed her husband, artist Jeffrey Metzner, and her children. In the first 10 years, she shot only her family without publishing photos. Her first show in New York was called
Friends & Family. She decided to show part of the images to the director of the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, John Sarkovsky. In 1978, he bought one and included in
MoMA exhibition
Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960.
A second exhibition –
Photography (Spring 1981): Couches, Diamonds and Pie – took place there. After that,
The New York Times and
The Sunday Times published a photograph of Sheila's husband. In 2008 the School of Visual Arts presented the exhibition
Time Line: Shelia Metzner at the Visual Arts Museum, New York.
Sheila Metzner lives in New York. She was married to the artist Jeffrey Metzner, with whom she had seven children.
Source: Wikipedia
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
