Sheila Metzner


Sheila Metzner is an American photographer. She was the first female photographer to collaborate with the glossy Vogue magazine on an ongoing basis. Metzner lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Early life

She 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.

Art career

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 : 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.

Collections

She was married to the artist Jeffrey Metzner, with whom she had seven children.