The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Occasion for Diriment

Occasion for Diriment

Date:: 1962
Medium:: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions:: 18.0 x 18.7 cm (7 1/16 x 7 3/8 in.)
Classification:: Photographs
Credit Line:: Rogers Fund, 1967
Accession Number:: 67.543.29
Rights and Reproduction:: © The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

This artwork is not on display

Description

Ralph Eugene Meatyard was a photographer and optician who spent the last two decades of his life in Lexington, Kentucky, producing an eccentric body of work at some remove from the photographic mainstream. He often posed his family and friends in enigmatic tableaux with props such as dolls and rubber masks, imbuing his images with a haunting Surrealist sensibility. The curious title of this photograph stems from Meatyard's passion for odd names, puns, and peculiar words and phrases. Diriment is a made-up word, a Lewis Carroll-like compound of "dire" and "merriment" that suggests a mood of high-spirited fun and hilarity fraught with anxious undertones.
Provenance

Photography in the Fine Arts
Notes

See variant in Ralph Eugene Meatyard, notes by Arnold Gassan and Wendell Berry, Lexington, KT: Gnomon Press, 1970, pl.12. The variant excludes the masked figure but shows virtually the same background.
See also
Who
Ralph Eugene Meatyard (59)
What
Photographs (31,883)

Gelatin silver prints (8,730)
Where
North and Central America (75,516)

United States (72,259)
When
A.D. 1900-present (75,419)
In the Museum
Photographs (30,898)
Timelines from the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.-present
Essays from the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
The Structure of Photographic Metaphors