The Photography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Born at the city of Normal, Illinois in May of 1925, Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an American photographer, a visionary artist known for his black and white portraits of friends, posed family members in masks, and experimental abstracted compositions. 
Raised in the city of Bloomington, Ralph Meatyard at the age of eighteen joined the United States Navy during World War 11. After his discharge from military service, he studied optometry through the government’s GI Bill at Williams College in Massachusetts. After his marriage to Madelyn McKinney, Meatyard and his wife relocated to Chicago where he began training as an apprentice optician.
From 1950 to 1967, Meatyard worked at Tinder-Krausse-Tinder, a large optical firm in Lexington, Kentucky. After leaving the company, he opened his own business, Eyeglasses of Kentucky, that created lenses for glasses. The city of Lexington was the site of the University of Kentucky and, during the 1960s, the gathering place for the area’s writers and intellectuals, many of whom became Meatyard’s friends. Among these artists and writers were novelist 
Wendell Berry, visual artist Guy Davenport, photographers Jonathan Williams and James Baker Hall, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, a poet who resided at Kentucky’s Abby of Gethsemani.
In 1950, Ralph Meatyard purchased his first camera to photograph Michael, his first-born of three children. Having become interested in photography, he joined the Lexington Camera Club and the Photographic Society of America in 1954, working primarily with a Rolleiflex 6cm square medium format camera. During the 1950s, Meatyard attended a series of summer workshops created by Indiana University’s photography teacher Henry Holmes Smith. He also studied under Minor Martin White, a photographer known for his technical mastery and his strong sense of light and shadow.
Meatyard embraced photography’s function as both a memory and documentary device. His images were populated with family and friends portrayed on suburban front stoops, beside cars, within backyards, and either outside or inside abandoned farmhouses. Meatyard’s subjects, dressed in everyday clothes, were photographed in tight focus from commonplace angles with just enough light. 
Addressing the issue of identity, he often portrayed family and friends behind costume-shop masks or paper bag faces. This single addition to a posed everyday scene radically altered the image’s context and hinted at an undiscovered story.
In 1956 through fellow photographer Frank Van Deren Coke, Ralph Meatyard entered his photographs in the “Creative Photography” exhibition held at the University of Kentucky. He frequented the Trappistine Abbey of Gethsemani where he shot a number of experimental photographs depicting his friend Thomas Merton posed on its grounds. In 1971, Meatyard collaborated with writer Wendell Berry on “The Unforeseen Wilderness”, a book about Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. The public response to this volume, which contained photography by Meatyard, rescued the gorge from construction of a federally proposed Army Corps of Engineers dam.
Meatyard’s photography began to be known nationally in the early 1970s through several museum shows and its publication in magazines. He had shown his work in several exhibitions alongside such photographers as Ansel Adams, Minor White, Harry Callahan, Edward Weston and Robert Frank. Over the course of his career, he produced a number of photographic series including 
“Romances”, “Dolls and Masks” and “Light on the Water”. Produced over a two year period, his final series of photographs, the 1974 “The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater”, contained sequential cryptic double portraits of friends and family members wearing masks and enacting symbolic dramas.
A pioneering and inventive artist, Ralph Eugene Meatyard died at the age of forty-six from cancer in his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky on the seventh of May in 1972. He was survived by his wife Madelyn and three children: Michael, Melissa and Christopher. Meatyard was cremated and his ashes scattered in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. His work is contained in several museums, among which are Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Notes: The name Lucybelle Crater in Meatyard’s final series was adapted by the artist from a character in Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”. Meatyard clearly intended that the identity of each person in the series not be known to the viewer of this work; he identified every character in this series with 
the same name: Lucybelle Crater. In each image, the Lucybell figure was portrayed by the artist’s wife, Madelyn Meatyard, who wore a costume-shop hag mask. This figure was paired with a family member or friend who wore a transparent mask that hid identity and aged the wearer.
“The Believer” is a quarterly literature, arts and culture magazine that specializes in criticism, literary non-fiction, and immersive reporting on contemporary issues. Investigative reporter and novelist Ted McDermott wrote an extensive article, “The Family Albums of Ralph Eugene Meatyard”, for its January 2007 issue: https://www.thebeliever.net/the-family-albums-of-ralph-eugene-meatyard/
Writer David A. Cory has a biographical article on Ralph Eugene Meatyard at the online photography magazine “F-Stop”: https://www.fstopmagazine.com/blog/2013/ralph-eugene-meatyard-by-david-cory/
San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery has an article on Ralph Eugene Meatyard that contains images from four of his series: https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/ralph-eugene-meatyard
Top Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Self Portrait), 1964-1965, Gelatin Silver Print, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Second Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Self Portrait), 1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 28 x 35.6 cm, Fraenkel Gallery
Third Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Boy by Abandoned House), 1968-1969, Gelatin Silver Print, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Fourth Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled (Table and Chair), circa 1957-1958, Gelatin Silver Print
Bottom Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Wagon Wheel), 1957-1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 19.3 x 21.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York