Ralph Eugene Meatyard (May 15, 1925 – May 7, 1972) was an American photographer from Normal, Illinois, U.S.
Table of Contents
- 1 Personal life
- 2 Life and career
- 3 Photography
- 3.1 Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic (FRAENKEL GALLER)
- 3.2 Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Stages for Being (UNIVERSITY OF K)
- 3.3 Ralph Eugene Meatyard A Retrospective
- 3.4 Meatyard / Merton: Photographing Thomas Merton (The Fons Vitae Thomas Merton Series)
- 3.5 Ralph Eugene Meatyard: An American Visionary
- 3.6 Ralph Eugene Meatyard
- 3.7 Ralph Eugene Meatyard: The Family Album Of Lucybelle Crater And Other Figurative Photographs
- 3.8 Ralph Eugene Meatyard: an Aperture Monograph
- 3.9 A Fourfold Vision
- 3.10 Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Personal life
Meatyard married Madelyn McKinney. They had three children: Michael (born 1950); Melissa; and Christopher (born 1955). Meatyard died of cancer in 1972. He was described as a “bookish Zenmaster also served as president of the local PTA and the Little League and flipped burgers at the Fourth of July party.
Life and career
Meatyard was born in Normal, Illinois and raised in the manageable town of Bloomington. When he turned 18 during World War II, he allied the United States Navy, though he did not promote overseas past the suit ended. After leaving behind the force he briefly studied pre-dentistry, before training to become an optician.
He moved in the same way as his new wife Madelyn to Lexington, Kentucky to continue effective as an optician for Tinder-Krausse-Tinder, a company which next sold photographic equipment. The owners of the company were sprightly members of the Lexington Camera Club, for which the Art Department of the University of Kentucky provided exhibition space.
Meatyard purchased his first camera in 1950 to photograph his newborn first child, and later than worked primarily considering a Rolleiflex medium-format camera. He united the Lexington Camera club and the Photographic Society of America in 1954. At the Lexington Camera Club he met Van Deren Coke, who exhibited pretend by Meatyard in an exhibition for the university circles entitled “Creative Photography” in 1956.
During the mid-1950s, Meatyard attended a series of summer workshops run by Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University, and also considering Minor White, who fostered Meatyard’s captivation in Zen Philosophy.
An autodidact and voracious reader, Meatyard worked in productive bursts, often desertion his film undeveloped for long stretches, then lively feverishly in the makeshift darkroom in his home. “His admission was somewhat improvisational and very heavily influenced by the jazz music of the time.” He used his kids in his play a part addressing the surreal “masks” of identity.
Much of his show was made in solitary farmhouses in the central Kentucky bluegrass region during associates weekend outings and in derelict spaces regarding Lexington. Some of his old-fashioned camera work was made in the traditionally African-American neighborhood in this area Lexington’s Old Georgetown Street.
Meatyard was a close acquaintance of several renowned writers in the Kentucky bookish renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, including his neighbor Guy Davenport, who vanguard helped compile a posthumous edition of his photos. In 1971, Meatyard co-authored a book upon Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, The Unforeseen Wilderness, with writer Wendell Berry. The two frequently traveled into the Appalachian foothills. Berry and Meatyard’s record contributed to saving the gorge from destruction by a proposed Army Corps of Engineers dam.[citation needed] Meatyard’s ashes were scattered in the gorge after his death.
Meatyard was with a buddy and correspondent of Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton, who lived at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery just west of Bardstown, Kentucky. Merton appeared in a number of Meatyard’s experimental photographs taken on the grounds of the monastery, and they shared an fascination in literature, philosophy, and Eastern and Western spirituality.[citation needed] Meatyard wrote Merton’s eulogy in the Kentucky Kernel shortly after his death in Bangkok, Thailand, in December 1968. Meatyard died four years later, in 1972, of cancer.
Photography
Though Lexington was not a well-established middle of photography, Meatyard did not rule himself a “Southern” or regional photographer. His do something was dawn to be approved nationally at the period of his death, shown and collected by some prominent museums and published in magazines. He exhibited considering photographers including Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Minor White, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, and Eikoh Hosoe. By the late 1970s, his photographs appeared mainly in exhibitions of ‘southern’ art, but have before attracted renewed interest.[citation needed] His best-known photography featured dolls and masks, or family, friends and neighbors pictured in isolated buildings or in shadowy suburban backyards.
Last update 2021-08-06