Text from The Encyclopedia of Photography (1984)

Meatyard, Ralph Eugene
American,1925-1972

Ralph Eugene Meatyard spent the last two decades of his life in Lexington, Kentucky, making his living as an optician, photographing mostly on weekends. Yet in the time snatched here and there, he was able to create a large number of haunting, enigmatic images. Meatyard's photographs present a world of somnambulistic mystery, a realm of disquieting intimations. Children appear as masked figures in decrepit rooms, enacting inscrutable dramas or charades. In every image there is something askew. Max Kozloff called Meatyard "a still life artist whose subjects unaccountably take off in slow, slight ways."

Intriguingly, Meatyard was born in Normal, Illinois. He did not begin to photograph until 1950 when he moved to Kentucky after service in the U.S. Navy, studies at Williams College and Illinois Wesleyan University, and an optician apprenticeship in Chicago. In 1954, he studied with the art historian and photographer Van Deren Coke. In the same year he joined both the Lexington Camera Club and the Photographic Society of America (in whose salon he first exhibited his work). His photographs were shown with those of Ansel Adams, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan and other modern masters in an exhibition curated by Coke in 1956. That summer Meatyard attended a photography workshop in Indiana where he worked with Henry Holmes Smith and Minor White. In 1957 Meatyard shared an exhibition with Coke at A Photographer's Gallery in New York City. His first one man show was held at Tulane University in 1959, the year in which a Meatyard portfolio was published in Aperture with an accompanying text by Coke. Meatyard was included by Beaumont Newhall in the "New Talent in Photography U.S.A." section of Art in America in 1961. During 1967-1970 he collaborated with the writer Wendell Berry on work which resulted in the book The Unforeseen Wilderness. Berry wrote of Meatyard's images: "These pictures invite us to live on the verge of surprise, where fear accompanies delight." It was fitting that some of Meatyard's best work was accompanied by written texts, for he was an avid reader, deeply influenced by modernist literature. The works of Pound, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams were especially important to him. He was influenced as well by painters such as Cezanne and Ensor.

In 1970 Meatyard learned that he had cancer. He continued to photograph, creating the major series of Lucybelle Crater images based on a story of Gertrude Stein's. He died in Lexington in May, 1972.