RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD
American
At first glance, Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s black-
and-white photographs from the 1950s and 1960s
seem like informal, playful snapshots of his family
and friends, suburban backyards, and peaceful
countryside. On closer inspection, his remarkable
photographs reveal a multitude of mysterious and
disconcerting elements. Lawns are scattered with
broken bits of discarded dolls; enigmatic ghost-like
figures emerge from the shadows; children’s faces are
frequently obscured by grotesque Halloween masks
in decrepit rooms, enacting inscrutable dramas or
charades. In every image, there is something askew.
Meatyard employed his knowledge as an optician;
his interest in Zen philosophy, photographic lan-
guage, and metaphorical representation; and ideas
taken from contemporary painting, literature, and
art theory to compile a rich variety of photographic
experimentation representing the ‘‘scientific nature
of camera vision and the spiritual essence behind
the visual world’’ (Tannenbaum 1991).
Meatyard, born in Normal, Illinois in 1925, grad-
uated from high school in 1943 and entered the
Navy. He attended Williams College in William-
town, Massachusetts in 1943–1944 under the Navy’s
V-12 program, where he became interested in the
works of poets and writers Ezra Pound, Gertrude
Stein, and William Carlos Williams. He was an avid
reader,whichlatertranslatedintoaninterestin
having his photographs accompanied by text and
collaborating on various projects with writers and
thinkers such as Roger Mertin, Wendell Berry, Guy
Davenport, Jonathan Greene, and James Baker
Hall, who were his contemporaries and formed his
intellectual and aesthetic circle. After the war, Meat-
yard married Madelyn McKinney in 1946, and he
apprenticed as an optician in Chicago. He received
his license in 1949 and began working in Blooming-
ton, Illinois. In 1950, he left to study philosophy at
Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, and after
one semester he accepted a job as an optician with
Tinder-Kraus-Tinder in Lexington, Kentucky where
heworkeduntilheopeneduphisownshopin1967.
Meatyard purchased his first camera in 1950 to
photograph his newborn son, and he quickly
became intrigued by the different ways he was
able to express himself and make visible hidden
worlds with a camera. In 1954, he studied with art
historian and photographer Van Deren Coke. In
the same year, he joined the Lexington Camera
Club (led by Coke) and the Photographic Society
of America, a national organization of amateur
photographers with a thrust towards photojourn-
alism. He participated in the PSA’s competitions,
salons, and national shows during the years 1954
and 1955, exhibiting his photographs which con-
tained the seeds of his later abstractions, blurred
images, and fabricated scenes.
It was his involvement with the Lexington Cam-
era Club that nurtured his interest in non-conven-
tional photography by emphasizing personal
expression and encouraging its members to photo-
graph figuratively and literally in their own back-
yards. In 1956, Van Deren Coke included his
photographs in an exhibition,Creative Photogra-
phy, at the University of Kentucky, along with
those of Ansel Adams, Aaron Siskind, Harry Cal-
lahan, and other modern masters. His first joint
project (1955–1956), a collaboration with Coke,
was a documentation of Georgetown Street, a
popular thoroughfare in Lexington. It was a meth-
odical photographic survey reminiscent of projects
carried out by the Farm Security Administration
and the Photo League in the 1930 and 1940s. This
was first time Meatyard utilized the series, a prac-
tice that he continued throughout his photo-
graphic career.
In the summer of 1956, Meatyard attended a
workshop at Indiana University, Bloomington,
Indiana, with Henry Holmes Smith, Minor White,
and Aaron Siskind, where the concepts of abstract
photography, technical experimentation, and the
expressive power of the photograph solidified his
work. Influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, he
embarked on a project where he painted images for
the express purpose of photographing them. He
also began a series of images of sunlight reflected
on the surface of water, which he continued for the
rest of his life. Other projects of this period included
the ‘‘No-Focus,’’ pictures which were abstracted
forms of pure light against darkness; and the Zen
Twigs and Motion-Sound series, both of which uti-
lized ‘‘the fluid boundaries between objects and theMEATYARD, RALPH EUGENE