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Father Louie Photographs of Thomas Merton by Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Ralph Eugene Meatyard's photographs are neither windows nor mirrors. They are not transparent. I do not feel that I am looking through them at the object or person or place being photographed. Neither are they reflective. I do not feel that I am looking at myself, figuratively or literally, in universal symbols of the artist's choosing. Meatyard's work is, to me, difficult to read. I feel after first viewing that I obviously have missed something very important, something that Meatyard felt very passionately and very clearly. Meatyard's book, Father Louie, is no exception. I glanced through it at Half Price Books (they had, at the time, three remaindered copies) and bought it for the express purpose of careful study. It contains 50 photographs, taken over a three year friendship, of Father Marie Louis who was known to the world as Thomas Merton before he entered a Trappist monastery. Many of the photographs are multiple exposures. Many others are nearly silhouettes. Many others are, at first glance, record shots made in the company of friends one of whom happens to be a monk. Since Merton's face is not that of a current celebrity, I felt no flash of recognition to help set the stage for me. Neither are the photographs in this book the portraits of a Newman or a Penn that force you to look at them by the sheer visual impact of the subject, the setting and the careful, obvious virtuosity of the artist. Had I seen only the dark, brooding, introspective photographs of Merton reading from his in-progress manuscript then I would have been attracted to them as exciting, unconventional portraits. The flat, matter-of-fact photographs of Merton in jeans and a denim jacket would have reminded me of FSA pictures of the mid south. The apparent snapshots of Merton and his friends standing in a field or enjoying a picnic would have left me puzzled as does much snapshot aesthetic work. The goofy, surreal photographs of Merton waving a thrysus (a wooden staff carved by a mutual friend of his and Meatyard's) or playing bongos while arrayed in his Trappist habit would have led me to suspect that Duane Michals was involved. Many people hold the opinion that the artist's intentions are not relevant to the viewer's response to a finished work. Venues ranging from camera club competitions to the Museum of Modern Art present individual works with, at most, a brief title and then expect the work to stand on its own. This book is a perfect example of work that does not and, at least for me, cannot stand on its own. There is no single image in this book that would catch my eye from across a gallery. Presented collectively in a gallery with no explanation, I am sure that I would have been at a loss to understand how the group of prints worked together. Father Louie also contains several essays about the friendship between Meatyard and Merton. These essays reminded me that Merton was a poet, philosopher, theologian (respected, perhaps, more in Eastern religious circles than in Catholicism), teacher, and lecturer. He was a hermit who loved crowds and observed "Who knows, maybe Saint Anthony took the streetcar into Alexandria when he got tired of loneliness." In short, he was a brilliant, complex, contradictory person. He was an obvious person to become friends with a brilliant, complex, contradictory artist like Meatyard and to become the subject of a brilliant, complex, contradictory book. It is not the photographs in Father Louie that are works of art. Neither is it the essays that are a work of art. It is the book itself that is a work of art. It is the artifact of collective creativity that must be cherished and understood as a whole or not at all.
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