The Females

An optician originally from Normal, Illinois, Ralph Eugene Meatyard joined the Lexington Camera Club while living in Lexington, Kentucky. There, he found his mentors Cranston Ritchie and Van Deren Cok and became, in his own words, a “dedicated amateur” photographer. Far from mainstream, Meatyard’s work includes experimentation with photographic abstraction, including motion blurs and multiple exposures. He often enlisted friends and family members to act out symbolic dramas in front of the camera with the help of props sourced from local shops and antique stores. He used masks as a means of non-personalizing his subjects, removing differences and resulting in an unsettling ambiguity.

In The Females, the outline of an incidental prop—a headless mannequin—echoes that of the cat in the foreground, creating an unexpected connection between the two. Much like a mask-wearing subject, there is a vacillation between identities: cat and mannequin, real and fictive.