Meatyard biography
Ralph Eugene Meatyard - International Center of Photography.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard: The Man Behind the Masks
One day in 1958 or ’59, Ralph Eugene Meatyard walked into a Woolworths store in Lexington, Kentucky.
Meatyard biography
An optician by trade, Meatyard was also a photographer—a “dedicated amateur,” he called himself—and he kept an eye out for props. He might drop by an antiques store to buy eerie dolls or emerge from a hobby shop with a jar of snakes or mice cured in formalin.
In Woolworths, he came upon a set of masks whose features suggested a marriage of Picasso and a jack-o’-lantern.
“He immediately liked their properties,” recalls his son Christopher, who was with him at the time. Meatyard père bought a few dozen.
Ralph eugene meatyard biography
“They were latex and had a very unique odor,” says Christopher, now 56. “In the summer they could be hot and humid.”
Over the next 13 years, Meatyard persuaded a procession of family and friends to don one of the Woolworths masks and pose in front of his camera.
The resulting photographs became the best known of the pictures he left