“Everything led to another thing, led to another thing, led to another thing,” Mr. Miller said.

Mr. Metzker had more than 50 one-man exhibitions, and his work is in more than 45 collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Museum of American Art in Washington and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

Ray Krueger Metzker was born in Milwaukee on Sept. 10, 1931. He grew up loving classical music, history and drawing. But photography became his passion after his mother gave him his first camera when he was 12. He began developing prints in his bedroom, studied photographs in Life and Look magazines and won high school competitions sponsored by Eastman Kodak.

His sister had cerebral palsy, and he believed that this affected the dark attitude of some of his early urban photos. He once wrote: “It was a difficult situation for anybody to surmount. Clouded with fear and despair, the problem had no solution. It was not the battle of life, but the wait of an unending night.”

Mr. Metzker graduated from Beloit College in Wisconsin with a fine arts degree in 1953. He was then drafted into the Army and stationed in Korea, where he taught photography and music appreciation. After his honorable discharge in 1956, he went to the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and studied there with the eminent modernist photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. He earned a master’s degree in 1959.

The series of pictures of Chicago’s downtown that constituted his master’s thesis caught the eye of Edward Steichen, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who bought 10 of his photographs. The same year, Mr. Metzker’s photographs were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He then traveled around Europe for a year and a half, taking, developing and selling pictures. After that he moved to Philadelphia, where he taught and was chairman of the photography and film department of the Philadelphia College of Art, now part of the University of the Arts.