Photos: Portraits of masked children too terrifying for Halloween

The twisted vision of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

When he died in 1972 at age 46, Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s experimental photography was just starting to be recognized. An optician from Lexington, Kentucky, Meatyard was a family-focused army veteran who picked up a camera in the 1950s and proceeded to create images unlike anything seen before or since. Today he is considered a canonical figure in American photography—an outsider artist whose work, though never fully realized, continues to influence and provoke.

In Appalachia, Meatyard was comfortably removed from the coastal art establishment and its influence. His photos, made mostly on weekend excursions with his wife and children to Lexington’s rural outskirts, speak to something entirely different—and darker—than the voyeuristic street snaps of Winogrand or the concept-laden landscapes of Robert Adams. Rather than pursuing outward spectacle, Meatyard plumbed the subconscious by choreographing surface—a nod to the limits of a medium hardly seen as a means for artistic expression. His motifs are as consistent as they are disquieting: masks and movement obscure identity, abandoned houses contain only emptiness. Meatyard’s photo album may be of his family, but their bodies are only stand-ins for the ghoulish characters who inhabit his nightmarish world.

Dolls and Masks by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Copyright © 2011 Radius Books.