Born in Brooklyn, Sheila Metzner attended Pratt Institute, where she majored in Visual Communications. She 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.
Through her lifetime, the celebrated photographer Sheila Metzner has amassed a portfolio that encompasses fashion and advertising shoots, portraiture, still lifes, and landscapes. “Photography...in its most basic form is magic...This image, caught in my trap, my box of darkness, can live. It is eternal, immortal,” she has said. In 1978, one of her early photographs was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking exhibition, “Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960.” This launched a career that has taken her around the world—on assignments for clients like Valentino, Elizabeth Arden, Perry Ellis, Fendi, Victoria's Secret, Saks Fifth Avenue, Revlon, and Shiseido—and for her own projects focused on the details of the human form and natural and urban scenes. Developed with the labor-intensive, time-honored Fresson and platinum printing processes, Metzner’s prints have a softness and depth aptly suited to her sensitively framed subject matter.