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Jessica S. McDonald

Free daily exhibition tours of Ed Ruscha: Archaeology and Romance

September 27, 2018 - Suzanne Krause

Tour Ed Ruscha: Archaeology and Romance

Through January 6, 2019

[Read more…] about Free daily exhibition tours of Ed Ruscha: Archaeology and Romance

Filed Under: Exhibitions + Events Tagged With: artist’s book, Ed Ruscha, galleries, Jessica S. McDonald

The “Wildly Strange” Photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

March 2, 2015 - Jessica S. McDonald

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, 1960. Gelatin silver print, 7.5 x 8 inches. Guy Davenport collection, Harry Ransom Center. © The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

The exhibition Wildly Strange: The Photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard opens March 7 at The University of Texas at Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art. The exhibition features more than 35 photographs exclusively drawn from the Ransom Center’s photography collection and archives of writers from Meatyard’s intellectual circle. The exhibition is organized by Jessica S. McDonald, the Nancy Inman and Marlene Nathan Meyerson Curator of Photography at the Harry Ransom Center. The exhibition will be on view through June 21.

 

Studying the creative process of artists and writers, as well as tracing collaborations and intersections between them, is at the core of research at the Harry Ransom Center. In March 2015, the Ransom Center will highlight the intersection of photography and poetry in its collections, while celebrating creative collaboration across campus, in an exhibition organized with the Blanton Museum of Art. Wildly Strange: The Photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard will feature approximately 35 photographs exclusively drawn from the Ransom Center’s photography collection and archives of writers in Meatyard’s intellectual network.

 

In the late 1950s, Meatyard (1925–1972) began staging elaborate visual dramas enacted by his wife, children, and close friends, and experimenting with multiple exposure, blur, and abstraction to imbue his images with an ambiguous, dreamlike quality. The abandoned farmhouses and densely wooded forests of rural Kentucky served as sets for Meatyard’s symbolic scenes, turning otherwise ordinary family snapshots into unsettling vignettes of life in a deteriorating South. Meatyard called these photographs “Romances,” adopting the definition American satirist Ambrose Bierce provided in his Devil’s Dictionary: “Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are.”

 

Groundbreaking in their time and challenging even today, Meatyard’s photographic fictions were embraced by his circle of writers and artists in Lexington, Kentucky. Guy Davenport (1927–2005), a close friend and neighbor, was routinely one of the first to examine Meatyard’s new work and used one of his photographs on the cover of Flowers & Leaves, Davenport’s 1966 long poem. Just after Davenport viewed the last of Meatyard’s photographs in 1972, he wrote to literary scholar Hugh Kenner of the “wildly strange pictures” he had seen. The exhibition will present an intriguing selection of Meatyard’s “Romances” made between 1958 and 1970, including rare variants of published images.

 

While Meatyard’s “Romances” are familiar to those who study and appreciate photography, his evocative portraits of writers are less well known. Often incorporating the spectral blur and unconventional angles of his primary work, they served as unconventional authors’ portraits for book jackets and promotional materials. Prints were exchanged among Meatyard’s sitters, and many entered the Ransom Center’s collections with their archives. A group of these portraits will be assembled in Wildly Strange: The Photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard to highlight the relationships both between these creative figures in Lexington and across the collections at the Ransom Center.

 

As the Ransom Center continually seeks innovative ways to share its collections, this collaboration with the Blanton Museum of Art will introduce its photography holdings to a new audience and will demonstrate the collective strength of the cultural institutions across The University of Texas at Austin campus.

 

Related content:

Manuel Álvarez Bravo and His Contemporaries: Photographs from the Collections of the Harry Ransom Center and the Blanton Museum of Art

 

Click on thumbnails to view larger images.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, 1960. Gelatin silver print, 7.5 x 8 inches. Guy Davenport collection, Harry Ransom Center. © The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard, “Untitled,” 1960. Gelatin silver print, 7.5 x 8 inches. Guy Davenport collection, Harry Ransom Center. © The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard, [Louis Zukofsky], 1967. Gelatin silver print, 7.5 x 6.75 inches. Guy Davenport collection, Harry Ransom Center. © The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard, [Louis Zukofsky], 1967. Gelatin silver print, 7.5 x 6.75 inches. Guy Davenport collection, Harry Ransom Center. © The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
Flowers and Leaves, by Guy Davenport (Highlands, NC: Nantahala Foundation/Jonathan Williams, 1966). On the cover: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, 1959. © The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
“Flowers & Leaves,” by Guy Davenport (Highlands, NC: Nantahala Foundation/Jonathan Williams, 1966). On the cover: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, “Untitled,” 1959. © The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

Filed Under: Art, Exhibitions + Events, Photography Tagged With: Blanton Museum, Jessica S. McDonald, Photography, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Wildly Strange

“Magnum Photos into the Digital Age”

October 1, 2013 - Alicia Dietrich

Image credit: Jonas Bendiksen, "Russia. Altai Territory. Villagers collecting scrap from a crashed space¬craft, surrounded by thousands of white butterflies. Environmentalists fear for the region’s future due to the toxic rocket fuel," 2000. © Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum Photos.
Image credit: Jonas Bendiksen, "Russia. Altai Territory. Villagers collecting scrap from a crashed space¬craft, surrounded by thousands of white butterflies. Environmentalists fear for the region’s future due to the toxic rocket fuel," 2000. © Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum Photos.
Image credit: Jonas Bendiksen, “Russia. Altai Territory. Villagers collecting scrap from a crashed space¬craft, surrounded by thousands of white butterflies. Environmentalists fear for the region’s future due to the toxic rocket fuel,” 2000. © Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum Photos.

The Harry Ransom Center presents the symposium “Magnum Photos into the Digital Age.” Scheduled for October 25–27, the symposium is in conjunction with the Ransom Center’s current exhibition Radical Transformation: Magnum Photos into the Digital Age.

Twelve Magnum photographers, including Christopher Anderson, Bruno Barbey, Michael Christopher Brown, Eli Reed, Jim Goldberg, Josef Koudelka, Susan Meiselas, Mark Power, Moises Saman, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Alec Soth, and Chris Steele-Perkins, as well as Magnum CEO Giorgio Psacharopulo are scheduled to appear in panel discussions with a focus on the cooperative’s evolution and future.

The symposium brings together photographers, curators, and historians to discuss the ways in which Magnum Photos has continually reinvented itself from the moment of its founding.

Panel moderators include Kristen Lubben, Curator and Associate Director of Exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, New York; Anne Wilkes Tucker, Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; David Little, Curator of Photography and New Media at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Stuart Alexander, Independent Curator and International Specialist, Photographs, Christie’s, New York; and Jessica S. McDonald, Nancy Inman and Marlene Nathan Meyerson Curator of Photography at the Ransom Center.

The Magnum Photos collection was donated to the Ransom Center by Michael and Susan Dell, Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, and John and Amy Phelan.

Filed Under: Exhibitions + Events, Photography Tagged With: Alec Soth, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Alex Majoli, Anne Wilkes Tucker, Bruno Barbey, Chris Steele Perkins, Christopher Anderson, David Little, Giorgio Psacharopulo, Jessica S. McDonald, Jim Goldberg, Josef Koudelka, Kristen Lubben, Magnum Photos

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