Ralph Eugene Meatyard
International Center of Photography, New York
December 10, 2004 - February 27, 2005
The photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972) defy convention. They have been called visionary, surrealistic, and meditative. Fascinated by the uncanniness of ordinary life, Meatyard made mysterious staged images using his friends and family—often involving masks and abandoned spaces—that are familiar and disturbing at the same time. Highly original and deeply emotional, Meatyard’s expressionist style and use of staged scenes foreshadows the work of many contemporary artists, such as Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Sally Mann, and Justine Kurland. The most comprehensive exhibition of his photographs to date, Ralph Eugene Meatyard will be the first major New York City showing of this work. The selection of over 150 photographs was made by Guy Davenport, scholar, poet, and friend of the artist.
Meatyard was an optometrist by profession who shot on weekends and printed his photographs in a makeshift darkroom in his home. From his thousands of images, he would select only those he considered his best, making just one or two prints of each negative. His strict attention to technique and consistency in print size achieved the aesthetic effects of photography he was seeking — a world seen through a full tonal range from black to white; intentionally strange, yet familiar and approachable.
From 1953 until his untimely death in 1972, Ralph Eugene Meatyard explored what he called the “photographic.” His earliest work from the mid-1950s includes a documentary project on Georgetown Street, a primarily African American neighborhood in Lexington, Kentucky. He then began an experiment that continued off and on throughout the 1960s with the more technical and formal aspects of the camera, using long exposures to record light reflecting off water, extreme focus for his “no-focus” images, and low depth of field for his “Zen twigs” series. By 1960, he was regularly making photographs of his three children in abandoned rural Kentucky mansions and in the forests surrounding them. Highly imaginative, even surrealistic, the photographs evoke a world not normally acknowledged with the human eye. They suggest the complex emotions associated with childhood, intimacy, loss, and destruction. These images, which form the largest component of the exhibition, are what Guy Davenport has called “charming short stories that have never been written.”
The visualization of the passage of time played an important role for Meatyard in all of his photographs —from long exposures to the maturation of his children, from timeworn buildings to the changing light gracing the natural world. For one of his last series, titled “Motion-Sound,” he made pictures by moving the camera gently, creating multiple exposures of woodland scenes that suggest visual sound patterns.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s engagement with photographing people is evident in a number of portraits he made of a circle of local writers with whom he developed great friendships, including Davenport, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, and Jonathan Greene. These friends not only provided intellectual inspiration and support, but often acted as collaborators in other projects. Meatyard also made a significant number of self-portraits in many of the same settings in which he photographed his friends and family.
About Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Meatyard was born in Normal, Illinois in 1925 and moved to Lexington in 1950, after serving in the U.S. Navy and studying at Williams College and Illinois Wesleyan University. He went to work at Tinder-Krauss-Tinder, an optical firm, which also sold cameras and other photographic equipment. That same year he bought a camera to photograph the first of his three children. Meatyard spent the rest of his life in Lexington, where he worked as an optician at his shop Eyeglasses of Kentucky and photographed in his spare time. His membership in the Lexington Camera Club in 1954 led to an enduring friendship with his photography teacher, Van Deren Coke. In 1956, summer workshops at Indiana University brought him in contact with such influential photographers as Henry Holmes Smith, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White. These interactions paved the way for Meatyard to launch his own photographic vision. Solo and group exhibitions soon followed across the country. His prodigious career ended in 1972 when he died of cancer.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Catalogue
Acclaimed writer and intimate friend of the photographer Guy Davenport made the selection of images, and Cynthia Young, ICP Assistant Curator, organized the exhibition. Ralph Eugene Meatyard will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by and interview with Davenport. The catalogue will be published by ICP / Steidl and released in December 2004.
Guy Davenport (born 1927) is a poet, artist, illustrator, short-fiction writer, essayist, literary critic, and noted translator. After attending Merton College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he received a PhD from Harvard University with a thesis on the work of Ezra Pound, and then taught English at several universities. His work has garnered such prizes as the O. Henry Award for short stories, the 1981 Morton Douwen Zabel award for fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Leviton-Blumenthal Prize for poetry, and a 1990 MacArthur Fellowship. Davenport lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
This exhibition was made possible with support from Frank and Mary Ann Arisman, Christian K. Keesee, and Richard and Ellen Kelson.
International Center of Photography
