Dolls and Masked Collection, Untitled 1957-1958
American photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (May 15, 1925 – May 7, 1972).
Over the next 13 years, Meatyard persuaded a procession of family and friends to don one of the Woolworths masks and pose in front of his camera.
The resulting photographs became the best known of the pictures he left behind when he died of cancer in 1972, at age 46. That work, says the photographer Emmet Gowin, who befriended Meatyard in the 1970s, is “unlike anyone else’s in this world.” Read more: Smithsonian