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February 09, 2006
I just love the theatricality of his staged images of his children and adult friends wearing dime-store Halloween masks in abandoned space. I also respect the evident disdain for the objectivity of photography:

R.E. Meatyard, Romance, From Ambrose Bierce #3, from Portfolio 3, 1964/1974
A self-taught photographer, and an optician by profession, he pursued photography mostly on weekends, taking many of his photographs in or around abandoned and dilapidated buildings in Lexington, Kentucky. He is known for the 1969-72 The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater in which the masks of an old man and woman are worn by Meatyard's wife and usually one other person.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled (Michael in front of deteriorating wall), 1960
He has an eye for the uncanniness of ordinary life.
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