The Supplement: Ralph Eugene Meatyard

There is something extraordinarily unsettling about the mask photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. For me at least, they cut down to the bone of half-remembered childhood anxieties; about waking up to find the world horribly altered somehow or finding your parents transformed or vanished or strange. It's not just the cheap Halloween masks - it's the ordinariness of the settings. Even the sunlight chills me a little bit.

"Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972) attended Williams College as part of the Navy's V12 program in World War II. Following the war, he married, became a licensed optician, and moved to Lexington, Kentucky. When the first of his three children was born, Meatyard bought a camera to make pictures of the baby. Quickly, photography became a consuming interest. He joined the Lexington Camera Club, where he met Van Deren Coke, under whose encouragement he soon developed into a powerfully original photographer. Meatyard used still images to record things usually reserved for moving images, such as the motion on subjects in an otherwise solid setting, scenes part sharp and out-of-focus, children and others sometimes masked, in seemingly normal, yet oddly disquieting, situations. His photographs create a world of mystery and one concerned with the ineffability of reality."

from stephendaitergallery.com