Photographers I Like – Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an optician who bought a camera to photograph his son, and ended up becoming heavily immersed in the world of improvisational black-and-white images. He died in 1972, at the age of 46, and as such left behind a truncated career. That said, what he achieved in his years with a camera is widely admired.

His most famous images, to my knowledge, are from his series, ‘The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater’, which featured friends and family posing in grotesque dime-store Halloween masks. A few examples:

Romance (N.) from Ambrose Bierce #3
© Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Untitled (Boy in Old Man’s Mask with Doll)
© Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

All scans courtesy of Masters of Photography

If these two images are not from the series itself, they are at least representative. The first one is not my favorite…I find the composition jarring and ultimately am not able to draw much from it. The second, though, I consider a brilliant image. The boy’s pose is perfect for the composition, and the lighting really helps to bring out the pose by focusing on the mask, doll and socks. There isn’t much more one can make of this image, unless one ties it to the larger series or just begins to deconstruct it along one’s own lines of interpretation. For my own part, I just like that it exists.

That said, Meatyard did not limit himself to grotesque mask work, and worked with everything from landscapes to portraits of family, friends or neighbors. These portraits, even at their simplest, carried a dark and serious feel; sometimes it was enough to simply have everyone standing in a yard at various depths, dolefully regarding the camera. In other cases, it might be an image of his wife and son in the doorway of a tomb. And yet in other cases, it could simply be two children:

Untitled (Michael and Christopher)
© Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

There is so much I could say about this portrait, that I barely know where to begin. From a composition point-of-view, I consider it magnificent. The boys are in the image together, but the natural contours of the house and yard have been combined with their poses to essentially place them in separate worlds altogether. The bizarre hand gesture and intense gaze of the older child in the foreground seem to sharpen the innocence and distance of the child in the background, whose gaze is directed placidly out of the shot. With a bit more study, the younger boy’s expression is (to me) inscrutable, and his bat and legs fall out of focus in a way that indicates some buzzing movement that perhaps helps to further foster the sense of possible menace in the image.

Meatyard took the photograph above in 1959; the following year, he took the two images below. In both, the camera’s ability to negotiate focus around movement is used to extraordinary effect.

Untitled (Michael and Christopher outside brick building)
© Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

A child seems to hang ephemerally in mid-air, with such a sense of motion as to disturb strongly the otherwise stationary wall and child that seem in a separate world.  These are actually the same two boys as in the prior shot, and even two examples seem to be enough to create a series that contrasts the possible personalities or interpretations of each subject.

In contrast, we have the image below.

Untitled (Michael in front of a deteriorating wall)
© Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

This is arguably my favorite of Meatyard’s images. The composition is brilliant, putting into full effect the splotches on the wall and the subject’s flailing arms, which appear to blend him into the wall while making him seem remarkably free and distant.

When I began my own portrait photography, I had never heard of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, but I knew I would sooner or later stumble upon someone who achieved results that would resonate with me where portrait photography was concerned. I love his work because the images seem to exist in some cross-over zone…they are not entirely portraits and they are not entirely free-standing works of art. Layers of complexity and changes in interpretation are numerous, but you don’t have to know the subjects to benefit from the images.

Eve Arnold, Yousuf Karsh, Philippe Halsman, Edouard Boubat, Henri-Cartier Bresson…one could start naming extraordinary photographers who captured the deep and complex richness of people in their own special way. But Meatyard will always resonate with me as one of the most unique and original photographers of the 20th century when it comes to people and lighting, and those are the two things that I feel make photography so much fun.

 

All scans courtesy of Masters of Photography