The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972)

Identity, family, and mortality in masked pairings of Meatyard's wife with relatives and friends, made during his terminal illness.

Description

The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, made by Ralph Eugene Meatyard in Kentucky in 1970-71, is a 64-photograph sequence pairing his masked wife, Madelyn, with relatives, friends, and neighbors wearing a second aging mask.

Conceived as a book after Meatyard’s terminal-cancer diagnosis in 1970, the project examines family, community, identity, and mortality. The sequence moves from immediate family to extended relatives and friends, including writers, photographers, and monks. Its title adapts the name Lucynell Crater from Flannery O’Connor’s short story "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." Every participant is named Lucybelle Crater, distinguished only by a stated relation, as in Lucybelle Crater and Close Friend Lucybelle Crater in the Grape Arbor. Meatyard wrote that the old-person mask forces each companion "to assume an identity with Lucybelle," while noting that each sitter remains distinct. Critics have read the device as suspending the identities and chronology of an ordinary family album, and as a meditation on Meatyard’s approaching death.

Each black-and-white portrait centers on two figures. Madelyn wears an oversized crone-like mask, while her companion appears behind a transparent or semi-transparent old-person mask. Photographed at medium distance, the sitters embrace, stand on porches, pose in yards, or occupy rural settings, recalling the gestures and compositions of ordinary snapshots. Their masks disrupt this familiarity, while domestic backgrounds remain distinctly visible. The final photograph, made on the Meatyards’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, reverses the established roles: Madelyn wears her husband’s clothes, and Meatyard wears her clothing and recurring mask.

Meatyard described his method as first finding a background and then placing content before it, treating masks as attention-getting "billboards" that directed viewers toward other details. The two dime-store masks, deliberate poses, costumes, captions, and carefully selected order form a fixed visual vocabulary whose small changes propel the sequence. Meatyard selected and sequenced the book before his death in 1972.

Selections appeared at the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1970 and MIT's Creative Photography Gallery in 1971. The Jargon Society published the project posthumously in 1974, although its design departed from Meatyard's planned black-page album with handwritten captions. James Rhem's revised 2002 edition restored the 64-image sequence and captions, coinciding with Fraenkel Gallery's first exhibition of the complete vintage set. Later presentations included DC Moore Gallery in 2018 and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art's 2022-23 survey of Meatyard's photography.

Behind the work

Meatyard bought roughly two dozen masks at a local dime store in the late 1950s while shopping with one of his sons; years later, two of them—the hag mask for Madelyn and a transparent old-person mask for her companions—became the fixed visual vocabulary of The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater.

After doctors told Meatyard in summer 1970 that his cancer was terminal and that he had only weeks to live, he continued to run his optical shop and photograph on weekends when his increasing weakness allowed.

Meatyard’s usual printing rhythm was intensely concentrated: he selected from the previous year’s negatives and spent several weeks printing in a makeshift bedroom darkroom, sometimes asking Madelyn to serve as a critic.

Quotes by the photographer

"Lucybelle is everybody and, though they don’t want to appear different to other people in the broad sense, the old mask forces them to assume an identity with Lucybelle. This may be taken as an ordinary family album, but it does bring in the idea that a Paul is a Paul."

"Billboards in any art are the first things one sees—the masks might be interpreted as being billboards. Once you get past the billboard, then you can see into the past (forest, etc.), the present, and the future. [...] more attention is paid to backgrounds, and that has been the essence of my photography always."

"[...] there are only two people. I think I have been able to eliminate the idea of a third person: the Intruding Photographer. Natural in their own right, unlike so many portraits."

"Last Judgment statement is very strong, but, Judge, the mask ain't me. I am the mask."

Tags and context

Credits: A limited image selection is reproduced for analysis, commentary, and research under Article 24(1)(3) of the Bulgarian Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act. SFMOMA (image source). Suggest an Edit