Ralph Eugene Meatyard

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (born May 15, 1925 in Normal , Illinois , † May 7, 1972 in Lexington , Kentucky ) was an American photographer .

life and work

Ralph "Gene" Meatyard was actually an optician and businessman who lived most of his life in Lexington, Kentucky. He was the elder of two sons - his brother Jerry became a sculptor and art teacher - served in the US Navy and attended Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts as part of the V-12 Navy College Training Program during World War II . In college, he developed an interest in the theater but was fired for "inappropriate behavior". After the end of the war, he moved to Bloomington , a town next to his birthplace, and married Madelyn McKinney. The newlyweds moved to Chicago , where Meatyard trained as an optician. Eventually, the couple settled in Lexington to open their own optician's business, Eyeglasses of Kentucky.

In 1950, Meatyard actually only bought his first camera to take pictures of their newborn son. As a photographer, he was self-taught , but he brought his experience as an optician to use with the camera. From 1954 he became more seriously interested in artistic photography and joined the Lexington Camera Club, where he made friends with the photo historian Van Deren Coke, who taught there. This was joined by a number of regional intellectuals, writers and photographers such as the cultural critic Wendell Berry, the writer and illustrator Guy Davenport, the mystic Thomas Merton , the poet Jonathan Williams and the photographers Aaron Siskind and Minor White . White introduced him to Zen Buddhism , from Siskind Meatyard took over the calligraphic - metaphysical imagery.

Gene Meatyard was considered an eccentric with a penchant for the cryptic and the macabre. He dealt with poetry , surrealism and zen. He mostly only took photos during the summer holidays, when his optician's shop was closed for two weeks. He only made prints once or twice a year. With his wife Madelyn, the children Michael, Christopher and Melissa and friends as staffage , which he sometimes disguised with masks , he staged theatrical-surrealistic black and white photographs in deserted suburbs or in seemingly unreal places , which “in a way the later productions of Cindy Sherman anticipated. ”( The New York Times ) Often abandoned, crumbling wooden mansions and burned-out ruins served as eerie backdrops. Meatyard's wife Madelyn turned, disguised in a Halloween mask, into the old witch "Lucybelle Crater", about whom the photographer created an entire fictional family album over the course of time . The photographs are accordingly provided with handwritten titles: Lucybelle Crater & bi-polar friend , Lucybelle Crater & fatherly friend , Lucybelle Crater & her bearded brother-in-law Lucybelle Crater (all 1970–1972).

Characteristic design elements in Meatyard's work are indistinct and distorted faces, blurred motion or natural environments, as they can be found above all in the series Light on Water , which deals with the reflections of the sun on water surfaces. Other well-known series are No-Focus , Abstractions and Zen Twigs, which were created from 1959 to 1963. The mood in Meatyard's photographic works is mostly meditative, melancholy and mysterious-mysterious. His friend Wendell Berry said that “Meatyard's world of images is based on an extremely complicated deep structure that hardly anyone can see through - not because Meatyard wants to hide it from us, but because it is actually a secret, the keys of which the photographer and the viewer do not have any more . ”In one of his last series, Motion-Sound from 1969, Meatyard experimented with multiple exposures that he recorded with a moving camera. In the resulting landscape shots , he achieved an apparent vibration effect.

Although he always stayed away from the big art metropolises, Meatyard exhibited together with numerous well-known photographer colleagues, such as Ansel Adams , Harry Callahan , Robert Frank , Eikoh Hosoe , Aaron Siskind, Edward Weston and Minor White.

At the height of his creative Ralph Eugene Meatyard died just a week before his seventh birthday at a cancer . At the same time, the journal Aperture dedicated a monograph to him . The photo book The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater , on which the photographer worked until his death, was published posthumously in 1974. A large part of Meatyard's work is in the archives of the University of Kentucky at Lexington, as well as in the collection of the George Eastman House in Rochester , New York .

literature

  • Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Guy Davenport, Cynthia Young: Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Steidl Verlag, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-86521-065-1 .
  • Judith Keller: Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Phaidon, London 2002, ISBN 0-7148-9318-8 .
  • James Rhem (Ed.): Ralph Eugene Meatyard - The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater and Other Figurative Photographs. DAP, Distributed Art Publishers, New York NY 2002, ISBN 1-891024-29-9 (English).
  • Barbara Tannenbaum: Ralph Eugene Meatyard. An American Visionary. Rizzoli International Publications Inc. et al., New York NY et al. 1991, ISBN 0-8478-1374-6 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ James Rhem: Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Retrieved October 5, 2012 .
  2. ↑ a b Ralph Eugene Meatyard. International Center of Photography, New York, accessed March 14, 2009 .
  3. ↑ a b Annette Grant: The Photographer Who Masked His Subjects. The New York Times , December 5, 2004, accessed March 14, 2009 .
  4. ↑ Ralph Eugene Meatyard. perlentaucher.de, accessed on March 14, 2009 .
  5. ↑ Michael Langford: The great photo encyclopedia. Christian, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-88472-087-2 , p. 372.
This article can not be adequately illustrated due to copyright reasons . At the moment there are no or only individual suitable images available, which are sufficiently licensed for further use .
Externally linked images may not be subject to free licenses such as GNU FDL or Creative Commons . See also the FAQ on images and image rights .
personal data
SURNAME Meatyard, Ralph Eugene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American photographer
DATE OF BIRTH May 15, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Normal (Illinois)
DATE OF DEATH May 7, 1972
Place of death Lexington, Kentucky