There's no mistaking a Meatyard photograph. Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972) was an eccentric in line with oddball American artists in other media: Emily Dickinson in poetry, Albert Pinkham Ryder in painting, Charles Ives in music. "The Family Album of Ralph Eugene Meatyard" at the High Museum of Art through May 10 is a good introduction to his unique practice. Appropriately, Gregory Harris, curator of photography at the High, arranged for the gallery where the 36 black-and-white prints are displayed to be painted an unusual way: The walls are dark gray halfway up and white from there to the ceiling. The small-format prints straddle the two colors.
Meatyard (the name derives from a Middle English term for a "measuring rod") was born and grew up in Normal, Ill.; he moved to Lexington, Ky., to take a job as an optician. Because of his profession he was interested in perception, but it was not until the early 1950s, when his son Michael was born, that he got a camera. Although many parents take pictures to record family life, Meatyard's family album was nothing like the ones Kodak advertised. He became an active member of the Lexington Camera Club and is quoted in its "Creative Photography -- 1956" catalog saying, "I seek to create a picture that has implications which may be explored for a new concept of thinking."
Thinking how? Except for some portraits, all of the pictures in the show are untitled; is that because Meatyard didn't want to give us clues to his intentions? Maybe he wasn't sure himself what he was up to or, when he was done, what he had accomplished. Or maybe he knew, but couldn't name it. The first photo in the exhibition was taken out of doors in 1962 in an area where the ground sparkles with what seems to be ice; it looks down on a group of people on the right side of the image. A young girl, 4 or 5 years old, stands in front, holding her hands together and looking down. She is between the legs of a seated adult whose tennis sneakers are probably those of a woman although she wears a male mask, realistic in shape but totally white and thus characterless. Another person, a boy, maybe a teenager, sits beside that figure, but his face is in such dark shadow that it is impossible to know anything about him. He holds a naked celluloid doll; another naked doll lies on the ground facing the group.
Dolls, masks, impenetrable shadows: a conjured enigma, all typical Meatyard. His tableaux don't always succeed, but when they do, their strangeness hints at things beyond ordinary ken.
In 1970, when he was diagnosed with cancer, Meatyard edited an eponymous photo book that was published by Gnomon Press; the prints in this exhibition are the ones he chose for that volume. The picture described above was on the cover. A self-portrait (c. 1964-66), in which he stands with his arms akimbo and a fiercely questioning expression, was the frontispiece. The setting of the first plate (1960) is the brick wall of an apparently derelict building; there is no glass in a window frame. A young boy wearing short pants and a baseball cap stands in overgrown grass looking at the empty frame from which -- amazingly -- a blurred figure is descending. But wait, the figure (of undefinable sex) is so blurred that maybe it actually is ascending. The boy, as are children in many Meatyard images, is the innocent witness to elusive goings-on.
In plate 19 (1960), a child (probably a boy) in dungarees and a black hoodie sits on a stone slab wearing the cheap plastic mask of a wrinkle-browed old man; a wrinkled plastic hand rests on his right knee. The head and raised arms of a doll stick out of the left side of the hoodie's kangaroo pocket. Is this youth contemplating old age, or does it represent an elderly man revisiting his boyhood? Is it tragic or comic or neither or somehow all at the same time?
The slightly blurred adult female figure emerging from the deep shadow in the corner of a room in an abandoned building is the subject of plate 15 (1969); what does she have in the big tote she carries in her right hand? The room, with its cracks and peeling paint in sharp focus, is more certifiably there than the vague, transient human figure. Plate 7 (1963) is shot from overhead so that the young girl lying on her back with her arms spread and her eyes shut seems to be floating on the roughhewn rocks beneath her.
In a 1961 interview for Art in America, photo historian Beaumont Newhall quotes Meatyard saying, "I work a great deal in romantic-surrealist as well as abstract for I feel that 'more real than real' is the special province of the serious photographer." His "more real" is frustrating, pleasurable, terrifying, exalting, and as familiar as our own peculiar families.
The Family Album of Ralph Eugene Meatyard
High Museum of Art, through May 10