Ralph Eugene Meatyard--Scary Masks

Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an optician turned photographer, not becoming the latter until buying a camera to document the life of his first child. By most accounts he was on the path to higher artistic achievement at the time of his early death in 1972 (he was only 47 years old). At the time of his death he had photographed and laid out a book titled The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater to be soon published. When it was released after his death it included this insightful preface by James Rhem. I highly recommend taking the 5 minutes to read it if you look at these photographs, enjoy them, and wonder what the huh is going on.

Heather made special note of Meatyard's photographs of people in scary masks, of which I will share a few. I'm not sure if all of these are from The Family Album of Lucybelle, but at least a couple of them are. My initial surface-level impression of these pieces is that he photographed his family and friends in normal daily situations, but with the added element of these super-freaky masks. Of the masks Meatyard himself said this:

Billboards in any art are the first things that one sees--the masks might be interpreted as billboards. Once you get past the billboard then you can see into the past (forest, etc.), the present, and the future. I feel that because of the "strange" that more attention is paid to backgrounds and that has been the essence of my photography forever.

Enjoy!