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Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Cranston Richie

1964/1974

About the Item

From a portfolio of ten gelatin silver prints from original Meatyard negatives (1959-71) Printed April 1974 Edition of 130 Credit stamp, verso 7 x 7 inches, image 15 x 12 inches, mount This photograph is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City. “This image probably owes some of its inspiration to the abnormal characters in the stories of Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 collection, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." But Meatyard was also looking at Giorgio de Chirico and the European Surrealists and here employs their penchant for the lifeless mannequin figure. A headless dressmaker’s dummy is set up on a chair at a level suggesting a woman’s height. Ritchie stands to ‘her’ left, his stiff pose and artificial limb making him seem her unnatural match. One reading of the fanciful coupling might be the marriage of an injured Civil War veteran and an African-American woman. The marriage theme suggests another, more remote model: that of Jan van Eyck’s fifteenth-century masterpiece, “Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife” (1434). —Judith Keller, Ralph Eugene Meatyard (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2002), pp. 28-9 An optician by trade, Ralph Eugene Meatyard was a self-described “dedicated amateur” photographer. He pursued his own vision to produce an exquisitely enigmatic, widely admired body of work. Meatyard began taking photographs in 1950, roaming the backwoods and towns in Kentucky, experimenting with framing, multiple exposures, and blurring to produce haunting, abstracted images of natural and manmade environments. In the late 1950s, he began incorporating monstrous, oversized latex masks and hands into his photographs, in addition to plastic dolls. His family and friends were the protagonists in his carefully composed scenes. For Meatyard, who was inspired by literature, Zen Buddhism, and jazz, the masks served to equalize his subjects and shift focus elsewhere—to the poignant juxtaposition of otherworldly faces on human bodies, to the ambiguous and unknowable in human nature.