Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Untitled (Boy Making Gesture) [Michael and Christopher]

1959/1974

From a portfolio of ten gelatin silver prints from original Meatyard negatives (1959-71) Printed April 1974 Edition of 130 Credit stamp, verso 6.75 x 6.75 inches, image 15 x 12 inches, mount This photograph is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City. “This photograph is found in the portrait section of the Time-Life publication "Photographing Children...

From a portfolio of ten gelatin silver prints from original Meatyard negatives (1959-71) Printed April 1974 Edition of 130 Credit stamp, verso 7 x 7.5 inches, image 15 x 12 inches, mount This photograph is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City. “Meatyard took his definition of romance from The Devil’s Dictionary (1911) compiled by American writer Ambrose Bierce from the satirical pieces he published weekly in the late nineteenth century. The American grotesque of Bierce’s tall tales is here combined with Meatyard’s Surrealist inclinations and the European, particularly French, interest in primitive masks, perhaps with the intention of creating a parody of high art. Rather than sports fans, the stadium benches...

From a portfolio of ten gelatin silver prints from original Meatyard negatives (1959-71) Printed April 1974 Edition of 130 Credit stamp, verso 7 x 7 inches, image 15 x 12 inches, mount This photograph is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City. An optician by trade, Ralph Eugene Meatyard was a self-described “dedicated amateur” photographer. He pursued his own vision to produce an exquisitely enigmatic, widely admired body of work. Meatyard began taking photographs in 1950, roaming the backwoods and towns in Kentucky, experimenting with framing, multiple exposures, and blurring to produce haunting, abstracted images of natural and manmade environments. In the late 1950s, he began incorporating monstrous, oversized latex masks...

From a portfolio of ten gelatin silver prints from original Meatyard negatives (1959-71) Printed April 1974 Edition of 130 Credit stamp, verso 7 x 7 inches, image 15 x 12 inches, mount This photograph is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City. “This image probably owes some of its inspiration to the abnormal characters in the stories of Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 collection, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." But Meatyard was also looking at Giorgio de Chirico and the European Surrealists and here employs their penchant for the lifeless mannequin figure. A headless dressmaker’s dummy...