Masks and Mirrors Concealment and Disclosure in Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater (1974, 2002)

This article examines the use of masks in the American photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s (1925-1972) posthumously published photo-book The Family Album of LucyBelle Crater (1974). For Meatyard, the spectral feature of photography – to make the invisible visible and vice versa - materializes itself in the use of masks as essential props designed to foreground not only a sense of secrecy and concealment, but also photography’s profoundly unstable ontological status. The use of masks enables an investigation into a form of spectral disorientation that resists the homogenization of time and space within photography, whilst at the same time allowing for a series of intimate portraits of the photographer’s friends and family. While introductions to exhibitions and catalogues on Meatyard have noted the presence of the uncanny in the LucyBelle Crater series, the use of masks in relation to his use of framing and positioning of figures has yet to be examined. By looking at individual photographs, the ontological hyper-awareness of Meatyard’s captions and literary references becomes another way to defamiliarize space and turn it into a fruitful staging ground, allowing Meatyard to render photography as a transformative rather than purely representational act

Exhibition · Framing (construction) · Invisibility · Photography · Portrait · Secrecy · Uncanny · Verisimilitude · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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