Passer d'un rêve à l'autre / To pass from one dream to another
Ralph Eugene Meatyard – The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, 1974
2026
Book cover
Photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, text by Jonathan
Williams
Venue
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.
With the support of the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body | With the support of the Australian Embassy in France and the French Australian Cultural Exchange Foundation (FACEF) | With the support of Fondation Bullukian
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