I am a great admirer of the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard and mainly of his Zen twigs series.  Meatyard was a student of Minor White’s who believed that a photographer could liberate the subject matter of a photograph through abstraction, sequencing and/or close up detailing. Using these techniques a photographer could create an image of something, “not for what it is but for what else it is.”

Meatyard also had a series of images which he titled, Romances of Ambrose Bierce, and these were made up of rather strange images, frankly the images were  weird and wildly fascinating. The images were staged and the settings were anything from an abandoned farmhouse to a random field and the subjects wore strange masks. For the longest time I wondered what these images had to do with Romance (i.e. Love and Relationships)? I read somewhere that the term had something to do wth the American writer Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914). I never really gave it much more thought since his Zen like twigs as well as his light on water series and no focus pictures are what really captured my attention. Then one day recently, after reading, Ralph Eugene Meatyard American Mystic by Alexander Nemerov (check out this video here), and reading his description of, Romance (N.) from Ambrose Bierce #3, 1962 and especially the part where he quotes Bierce’s definition, “Romance has no allegiance to the god of things as they are” and “can range at will over the entire region of the imagination-free, lawless, immune to bit and rein”, I became intrigued and decided to see if I could find a copy of this Devil’s Dictionary. Those few phrases captured my imagination and I could see how a subversive and humorous spirit like Meatyard, who lived in Middle America in the 1950’s, would use the ideas embodied by Ambrose Bierce to express himself.

The next day I set out to my place of work with the idea that I would go to the library and see if I could get a hold of a copy or go online and buy a copy of Bierce’s, The Devil’s Dictionary. From the title of this entry you can guess where this is going. At the station house where I daily wait for my train into New York there is one of those old fashion book displays with circular, rotating levels. The stand holds books from the local library that are free for the taking to local train commuters. It is usually restocked from donations of books by the good people of Maplewood. On that display, on the very day I had Ambrose Bierce on my mind I found a copy of The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce on that stand. Free for the taking! Deep in my soul I felt old Ralph Meatyard smile and felt a little more connected to a man I only knew from his photographs.