Fascinated by the uncanniness of ordinary life, Ralph Eugene Meatyard made mysterious staged images that are familiar and disturbing at the same time. In and around his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, where he worked all his life as an optician, Meatyard posed his family and friends, sometimes wearing masks, against the backdrop of derelict plantations houses and other abandoned spaces. The seemingly normal gestures and situations in the photographs become wondrous and strange.

Meatyard was born in Normal, Illinois, in 1925. He served in the U.S. Navy and briefly attended Williams College and Illinois Wesleyan University before training to become an optician. In 1950, he moved to Lexington to work at Tinder-Krauss-Tinder, an optical firm that also sold cameras and other photographic equipment. He bought his first camera that year merely to photograph the first of his three children. Intellectually curious, Meatyard quickly grew intrigued by the photographic process itself, and in 1954 he joined the local Lexington Camera Club, where he formed a lifelong friendship with his photography teacher Van Deren Coke. At a summer workshop at Indiana University in 1956, Coke and Meatyard met Henry Holmes Smith, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White. These influential photographers encouraged Meatyard to develop his own photographic vision.

In his largest group of photographs—referred to here as the “Romances”--Meatyard sought to evoke a world not normally acknowledged by the human eye: the unexpressed relationships between people. These staged images are almost literary in their implied narratives, what writer Guy Davenport has called “charming short stories that have never been written.” Although they present strange juxtapositions and embrace accidents, these unsettling pictures are not so much surrealistic as transcendental. With a quiet spiritual force, they suggest the complex emotions associated with childhood intimacy, innocence, loss, and destruction.

Cynthia Young
Assistant Curator

The exhibition was organized from a selection of prints made by Guy Davenport.

It was made possible with support from Frank and Mary Ann Arisman, Christian K. Keesee, and Richard and Ellen Kelson.