Biography of ralph eugene meatyard books
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Ralph Eugene Meatyard : with an essay by Guy Davenport
The photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard defy convention: they have been called visionary, surrealistic, and meditative. Whatever the label, these evocative images of friends and family and the natural world around his home illustrate a delicate psychology of human interaction. Meatyard was trained as an optician, a profession that he maintained all his life in Lexington, Kentucky; he bought a camera in 1950 for the sole purpose of photographing his first-born son. But shortly thereafter, he joined the Lexington Camera Club and developed a friendship with his photography teacher Van Deren Coke, as well as a circle of local writers and photographers, including Guy Davenport, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, Jonathan Williams, and Minor White. Family and friends freely participated in Meatyard's staged and mysterious images, which often involve masks and abandoned spaces, and obliquely reference social, political, and cultural issues. A key subject in Meatyard's work is the natural environment, which is featured in his Light on Water series, in which long exposures seem to create calligraphic texts, and his No-Focus series, in which he deliberately photographed stems and twigs out of focus. In one of his l
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Biography
Ralph Eugene Meatyard built both of his careers--photographer and optician--on his vision. He was born in Normal, Illinois, and graduated from University High School at Illinois State University in 1943. He served in the military until 1946, became a licensed optician in 1949, and accepted a job in 1950 with an optical firm in Lexington, Kentucky, where he remained until he opened his own shop in 1967. His involvement with photography began in 1950, after the birth of his first son. By 1954 he was studying photography with Van Deren Coke, and had joined the Lexington Camera Club and the Photographic Society of America. The blurred figure, a hallmark of his work, began to appear the following year. In 1956, Meatyard's images were presented along with those of Ansel Adams, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan in Creative Photography, an exhibition curated by Coke for the University of Kentucky. Although Beaumont Newhall considered him in a 1961 article for Art in America entitled "New Talent in Photography U.S.A.," Meatyard received scant recognition during his lifetime; he joked that he had the only copy of Newhall's The History of Photography with his work included, since he had glued one of his own images into the book. The posthumous release of Meatyard's first
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The Family Photo album Of Lucybelle Crater Favour Other Metaphoric Photographs
Photographs: Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Text: James Rhem
Publisher: D.A.P Distributed Craftsmanship Publishers
128 pages
Year: 2002
Price: 50 €
Comments: Hardcover access dust cap, , b&w photographs.
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