Unmasking the Art of Ralph Eugene Meatyard : Lecture: His dark-edged photos are caught between optimistic documentary and cool investigation, critic says.

“There is this moment in all (Ralph Eugene) Meatyard’s work,” art critic Jonathan Green said Tuesday, “where the world can dissolve into something that is terrifying--maybe children’s bad dreams, maybe death itself.” Even children, frequent subjects in Meatyard’s photographs, live “on the edge,” Green said, threatened by “extinction, darkness and childhood fears--the grown-up world of terror.”

Green discussed Meatyard’s work in a noon lecture at Newport Harbor Art Museum, where the exhibit “Ralph Eugene Meatyard: An American Visionary” remains through Feb. 14. Green is director of the California Museum of Photography in Riverside. He also is a professor in both the studio and art history departments of UC Riverside, and the author of “American Photography: A Critical History,” which will be reissued by Abrams later this year.

In Green’s view, Meatyard’s photographs from the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s are caught between two sensibilities in American photography.

On one side are the “heroic surface world” of monumental portraits and landscapes by such artists as Margaret Bourke-White and Ansel Adams and the “optimistic tradition of the American documentary movement.” The latter is typified by the popular 1955 traveling exhibition, “The Family of Man,” with its images of individuals seen as part of a huge canvas of humanity.

On the other side is the coolly investigative post-modern view that arose in the ‘80s. Such artists as Barbara Kruger and Victor Burgin confront a culture in which photography--including advertising and TV images--no longer merely records external events but becomes the central event.

In the middle was Meatyard, who (in common with Minor White and a few other photographers) pursued an elusive world of metaphor beneath surface appearances.

Meatyard explored “the terrors of the unknown” by creating an elaborately staged world of dark backgrounds and blurred movement, employing a variety of props (including masks) and narrowly focusing the viewer’s attention via the “unnatural” square format of his prints.

Meatyard’s use of children, maimed individuals and masks differs markedly, Green said, from the practices of such otherwise kindred contemporary photographers as Sally Mann, Diane Arbus, Joel Peter Witkin, Garry Winogrand and Francesca Woodman.

For example, in a Mann photograph of two little girls--one wearing a dress and sucking her thumb, the other nude and standing boldly with arms akimbo--the contrast is between child and precocious woman-to-be. Mann is dealing with “the subtle sexuality of children,” Green said, couched as “a careful commentary on a social human condition.”

But in Meatyard’s “Untitled (Child with skull mask),” the duality is between “the innocence of a baby (standing) with her arms up and a skull,” Green said. “There is always the potential of death lurking around the corner. The poignancy is that this is not old age and death but innocence (and death).”

The persistence of imagery of death and decay in Meatyard’s work suggests to Green a certain “Southern Gothic” quality “in which the past intrudes on the future,” reminiscent of the fiction of William Faulkner or Carson McCullers.

While Arbus looked at “a certain strangeness in the real world”--like identical triplets sitting together on a bed, or a small boy and girl going through the motions of a ballroom-dance contest--Meatyard’s staged imagery was “more intense, more psychological, more primal,” Green said.

In Meatyard’s photograph, “Untitled (Child as a bird),” a boy moves his arms--they register as blurs--below an area of peeling paint that resembles bird wings. (“Is there a relationship between innocence and flight?” Green wondered aloud.)

He sees no tinge of sexuality in Meatyard’s vision of childhood, only a “generous, gentle” spirit of “innocent camaraderie” underneath the evocation of childhood terrors.

In “Untitled (Boy holding flag and doll),” from 1959, a boy sits in a chair waving a flag and holding a broken unclothed doll. In Green’s view, this is an example of Meatyard viewing “real events” (symbols of patriotism, the fragility of childhood) through the perspective of “a world of innocence.”

On the other hand, in 1967, when Arbus shot “Patriotic Young Man with a Flag”--an unbalanced-looking fellow clutching an American flag--she was “dealing with real politics” in a “biting, ironic” way.

Unlike photographers who use masks in a festive or titillating way (or, as Witkin does, to distance the viewer from the full impact of grotesque or violent sexual imagery), Meatyard employed masks to invoke a child’s “night terrors,” Green said. “By changing your mask, you become another person.”

In Meatyard’s “Romance (N.) from Ambrose Bierce No. 3,” four children wearing ghoulish Halloween masks sit on numbered bleacher steps.

Arbus, on the other hand, portrayed misfits and mentally impaired people whose alien, mask-like features are actually their own faces, as in “Russian Midget Friends in a Living Room on 100th Street, N.Y.C.”

Ultimately, Meatyard’s view of humanity is “less terrifying” than that of Witkin or even Arbus, Green said.

“The ease with which (Meatyard’s figures) can put on and take off their masks shows their willingness to deal with their terrors . . . (They are) Southern Gothic innocents, exploring some of the terrors of the unknown, but not sucked into it for eternity.”