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Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Madonna

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 6.5 x 7 inches, image 15 x 12 inches, mount This photograph is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City. “Madelyn Meatyard was an indulgent model. The role her husband usually chose for her was that of mother, posing with one or more of her three children. Here, he stations her before an arched window. The pious atmosphere created by this framing is contradicted by Madelyn’s everyday dress and by the dilapidated Venetian blinds behind her. Unlike a traditional religious icon, this Madonna gazes sternly into space, while her small child stands facing the maternal loins from which she sprang. Many photographers prior to Meatyard—such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edwards Weston and Harry Callahan—had produced series based on their beguiling wives.” —Judith Keller, Ralph Eugene Meatyard (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2002), pp. 86-87 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.
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