new site of the week
10:14 p.m.
blah, that last entry was a real waste of time...oh, well.
hey, is anyone out there familiar with the work of ralph eugene meatyard? (is that a cool name or what?) click on "site of the week" for some amazing photos...here's one of my favorites of his...
here's a brief bio:
"It is the feeling of mystery and melancholy in Meatyard's work that I find the most moving. He seems to have recorded a whole world through the cracked crystal of a nineteenth-century flowered paperweight. To engender this feeling he had a special way of suspending in semi-darkness strange and rhythmic shapes that have a sonority more felt than seen. Although I knew him well for all of his creative life, only now do I feel I may have a clue as to what his photography meant to him. Even so, I cannot decode the iconography of his work. That is part of its appeal."
Ralph Eugene Meatyard was a self-taught photographer. An optician by profession, he pursued photography mostly on weekends. He was a student of Van Deren Coke and credited Coke as a strong influence, along with Henry Holmes Smith and Minor White.
Meatyard's photographs deal with contradictions. He used still images to record things usually reserved for moving images, such as the motion on subjects in an otherwise solid setting, scenes part sharp and out-of-focus, children and others sometimes masked, in seemingly normal, yet oddly disquieting, situations. His photographs create a world of mystery and one concerned with the ineffability of reality.
Meatyard once wrote: "I work in several different groups of pictures which act on and with each other -- ranging from several abstracted manners to a form for the surreal. I have been called a preacher -- but, in reality, I'm more generally philosophical. I have never made an abstracted photograph without content. An educated background in Zen influences all of my photographs. It has been said that my work resembles, more closely than any photographer, 'Le Douanier' Rousseau -- working in a fairly isolated area and feeding mostly on myself -- I feel that I am a "primitive photographer." ("Photographer's Choice," no. 1, Spring 1959, Bloomington, Ind.)
Meatyard's work is housed at the Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, Smithsonian Institution and many other important collections.
- Van Deren Coke
i haven't really checked out much at the the george eastman house (where this site is located), but it looks like it's full of great stuff. have fun!