Meatyard, Ralph Eugene

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, (born May 15, 1925, Normal, Illinois, U.S.—died May 7, 1972, Lexington, Kentucky), American photographer and optician known for his photographs in which family members and friends appear wearing grotesque masks.

Meatyard served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and then, on the navy’s V-12 program, attended Williams College but did not earn a degree. In 1949 he earned an optometry license while working as an apprentice and the next year moved to Lexington, Kentucky, and found a job at the Tinder-Krauss-Tinder optical firm, a position he held until he opened his own shop, Eyeglasses of Kentucky, in 1967.

Upon the birth of his first child in 1950, he bought a camera. Four years later he joined the Lexington Camera Club, where he met American curator, writer, and photographer Van Deren Coke, who encouraged him to explore photography for its expressive possibilities. Meatyard worked full-time as an optician, leaving only the weekends for photography.

He met photographer Minor White in 1956 at an Indiana University workshop on abstract and experimental photography. Meatyard was a voracious reader, so, when White introduced him to books on Zen philosophy, the writings of designer and artist György Kepes, and André Breton’s writings on Surrealism, the photographer read them all carefully. Zen, in particular, strongly influenced Meatyard’s photography in that his photos reflected the connection between nature and humans. His Zen Twigs series—close-up detailed images of thin tree branches set against an out-of-focus background—is the most obvious manifestation of his interest in Zen. Coke included Meatyard’s photographs in “Creative Photography–1956,” an exhibition at the University of Kentucky that also featured Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan. Two years later Meatyard began his No-Focus photographs, a short series that, as their title suggests, have no focus but instead are abstract compositions of light and dark forms. In 1959 Meatyard had his first solo exhibition (Tulane University) and was featured in Aperture magazine.

Throughout the 1960s Meatyard traveled around Kentucky on the weekends with his family and took staged photographs. He typically chose the setting first and then arranged his tableau of people and props before it. Many of his photographs feature his own children wearing freakish dime-store masks and posing in front of abandoned houses and buildings. Meatyard used masks to eliminate or obscure differences among the pictured individuals. He was also interested in movement and willingly included the blurriness of a moving head or arm, lending a dreaminess or ghostliness to his photographs.

Meatyard was diagnosed with cancer about 1970, and he spent the last two years of his life working on the Lucybelle Crater series, photographs taken outdoors of his wife wearing a mask of an old hag and accompanied by one of their friends or relatives wearing an old man mask. All the individuals in the photographs are called Lucybelle Crater (Meatyard wrote captions for each of the 64 images), a name derived from Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” Meatyard appears with his wife in the first and last photographs in the series. The entire series was published posthumously in 1974 as The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater.

Throughout his short life, Meatyard was friends with many writers and poets, including Guy Davenport, Wendell Berry, publisher and poet Jonathan Williams, and monk and prolific writer Thomas Merton. He photographed them, and each of them wrote on him. Berry, with whom Meatyard collaborated on a project documenting Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, published a volume of writings in defense of protecting the gorge, accompanied by Meatyard’s photographs (The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, 1971; rev. and expanded, 1991). Among Davenport’s writings were his reminiscences on the photographer after his death and an essay titled “Tom and Gene” (1996) about Merton and Meatyard. Merton and Meatyard had a short but prolific period of correspondence, which was published alongside photographs in Father Louie: Photographs of Thomas Merton (1991), and Williams published the first printing of Lucybelle Crater.

Had Meatyard not died prematurely at age 46, he would likely have flourished during photography’s heyday and not remained on the fringes of its history throughout the late 20th century. His work was celebrated while he was alive, especially among his peers, but it fell into obscurity for 25 years. In the 21st century, however, Meatyard’s oeuvre resurfaced and was reexamined, especially within the context of work by contemporary photographers interested in identity and illusion, such as Cindy Sherman, and staged tableaux, such as Gregory Crewdson and Emmet Gowin.