And Other Figurative Photographs
by Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Edited by James Rhem
ISBN: 1891024299
I find Meatyard’s photography fascinating. I’m not always sure what I’m looking at, even when I know what it is (a child crouching, a figure in a mask) I’m seeing. As I’ve said about his work before, the man took pictures of ghosts.
Though all the objects in his photographs are quite real — houses, back yards, front steps, fences, parked cars — they are at the same time unnerving in ways that make the viewers question what they mean, and what is true.
Unnerving was definitely Meatyard’s intent, which is is why everyone in the “family album” is wearing one of two plastic masks. There is Lucybelle herself, a hideous, opaque hag mask covering her head. Then there are Lucybelle’s friends and relations, the friends of her relations, and the relations of some friends. All of them are wearing a creepy translucent mask covering their faces.
The family album is the core of the book, presented the way Meatyard intended. (He died before the first printing of the book in 1974.) There are 64 square black and white photographs on black pages, with handwritten captions in white printed underneath. Lucybelle is in every photograph, and the captions tell the viewer who else is in the photograph, as they relate to her: “LCB + her bearded brother-in-laws short wife LBC.”
The figures in the photographs have a sameness that is at first jarring — the plastic masks — yet after awhile they become expected. The photos are otherwise so normal: posing in front of a house, in the yard, by a fence. There are swingsets, parked cars, mown lawns, leafless trees marking the season in many of the pictures. In two, you can make out Meatyard’s shadow, cast onto Lucybelle and the person she is with. The photographs are weird, and compelling in that they invite questions and storytelling.
From these photographs, I’d say Meatyard was interested in identity, in what it means to be somebody in particular to somebody else, and how we see (or don’t) relationships between people. Lucybelle is always the same woman wearing the mask, except for the very last photo. The people with her are oddly specified: a bearded brother-in-law, her regular mother, and “same” after the first photo of “one of 7 kids of Mertonian friend.” He was getting at something, and while I am not sure what exactly it was, I enjoyed spending time with his photographs trying to figure out.
Also is this book are two essays, in which Rhem provides a biographical sketch of Meatyard’s life, opinions about his work in general, and a detailed analysis of Lucybelle. His exhaustive research allows him to identify all of the “real people” in the family album, and who they were to Meatyard. (Lucybelle was always his wife Madelyn, except for that last photo in which a sick and thinner Meatyard wearing his wife’s clothes is Lucybelle, and she is him.) While I appreciate the digging for the detail, I don’t think you need to read about who people really were to “get” the pictures. Rhem acknowledges that, and I confess that acknowledgement is probably what kept me reading his prose.
Also in this book are photographs representing Meatyard’s other work: no-focus, “sound” experiments, still-life arrangements with figures, and figures in empty, abandoned buildings. Rhem included them to provide a context for the Lucybelle work. They make me want to see more of Meatyard’s photographs, so I can puzzle over them, enjoy them, and marvel at them. I’m also curious about Meatyard’s life. He wasn’t a professional photographer, as having a wife and children meant he needed a day job to support his family, yet he had strong ideas about art. His photographs could launch many a discussion about art, what it is, and what it isn’t. Highly recommended.
Glad you kept reading. As Guy Davenport once said to me when we were talking about my Lucybelle book during the 9 years I spent researching it, “you’re doing a “Ring In The Book.” In that Browing poem a story is told from multiple points of view. In tracking down all the “real people” photographed in Lucybelle I established the facts of a story that, like each of our lives, is more than a mere “concept” or “idea.” For Meatyard the “concept” the “meaning” was also a story, they story of his own life projected onto Lucybelle (who he becomes in the last photo and has actually always been in the series). One can probably sum up the “meaning of Lucybelle by saying someting like ‘we’re all different and all the same,’ but then what do we have? It is the implined (if long or quickly forgotten) bonds of feeling and relationship that keep the succession of stories that are our lives from being meaningless.