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Meatyard, and More Later

Over on wood s lot I saw a picture of Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s. I hadn’t heard of him before. I followed a link from there and found another arresting image, a photograph capturing the motion blur of a boy wearing a white t-shirt, flapping his arms like wings in front of a decrepit wall.

The Jargon Society has a short article about Meatyard, which notes the strangeness of his name, and that of his birthplace, a town called Normal. Then again, his apparently most well-known book is titled The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater (inspired by a Gertrude Stein short story). He worked on that book after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1970 and he died in 1972.

There is something about his photographs that has ideas about a definition of art and what it means to look swirling in my head, but they aren’t well-formed enough yet. I’ll come back to them, given that my reading list these days is things like Visual Studies and a book based on an exhibtion of Mexican photography.