Ralph Eugene Meatyard Photography

Ralph Eugene Meatyard built both of his careers--photographer and optician--on his vision.

Ralph eugene meatyard photography. Working outside of the photographic mainstream Ralph Eugene Meatyards imagery consisted largely of symbolic dramas set in ordinary often abandoned places and enacted mostly by his own family. Biography By vocation an optician by avocation a self-described dedicated amateur photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard pursued his own vision to produce an exquisitely enigmatic widely admired body of work. Ralph Eugene Meatyards death in 1972 a week away from his 47th birthday came at the height of the photo boom a period of growth and ferment in photography in the United States which paralleled the political and social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.

He bought a camera in 1950 for the sole purpose of photographing his first-born son. The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater as Meatyard envisioned it comprised sixty four 7x7 inch photographs. Ralph Eugene Meatyard born May 15 1925 Normal Illinois USdied May 7 1972 Lexington Kentucky American photographer and optician known for his photographs in which family members and friends appear wearing grotesque masks.

An Aperture magazine notable. A monographic double issue guest-edited by James Baker Hall devoted to the work of self-taught photographer Meatyard. Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an American photographer known for his enigmatic portraits and use of multiple exposures.

Rhems essay not only captures perfectly the comedictragic apsects of Meatyard work and I suspect in a better way than the artist could have done himself but also has universal application for seeing in the arts. Taken as a whole his photographs seem to embody a belief that revelation does not depend on sight. The photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard defy convention.

They have been called visionary surrealistic and meditative. Ralph Eugene Meatyard 1925-1972 spent three months looking through an unfocused camera in order to learn to see No-Focus Working roughly 30 years before Uta Barth Meatyard an optician who practiced photography began the project because of his initial attraction to the out-of-focus backgrounds in some of his images. Though he did not gain much recognition during his lifetime the artists haunting images of masked children have since established him as a key figure in American photography.

But shortly thereafter he joined the Lexington Camera Club and developed a friendship. At the time of his death in 1972 the brilliant American photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard had just completed a work that seemed quite different from the images for which he was widely known. James Rhem has composed a superb monograph on the little known at least to me photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard.