Ralph Eugene Meatyard – The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, 1974

Emmanuelle Firman

Venue

Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon (macLyon)

Lyon

Born in 1925, Normal, Illinois, United States
Died in 1972, Lexington, Kentucky, United States

Masked figures occupy the everyday landscapes of post-war Kentucky: suburban streets, front gardens, wooded clearings and abandoned buildings. Shaped by histories of settler colonial expansion, these settings become the stage for Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s carefully composed photographs, presented here as archival reproductions. Family members and friends appear beneath grotesque latex masks whose repetition binds different bodies into a strange collective presence, unsettling the individuality on which the family portrait depends. For Meatyard, theatricality sharpened perception, casting both identity and ownership as performances enacted through shared rituals and inherited roles.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s photographs are often populated by enigmatic figures and marked by experimentation with photographic techniques of abstraction. Without distinguishing between what might be ‘real’ and what might be ‘hidden’, they give each appearance the quality of a mask.