Ralph Eugene Meatyard

The strongest of the images in this small show draw us into Meatyard’s dreamlike world, seducing us with unexpectedly strange and macabre situations. Few photographers since have

explored these spiritual netherworlds with such visual sophistication. Seeing the three series on view here is a particular treat, as they haven’t been shown or reproduced as often as many of Meatyard’s more famous projects. Placed between singular works from the 1960s and the Lucybelle Crater series of the early 1970s, they provide an important stylistic bridge, beginning to connect together a range of separate ideas into more layered narrative forms.

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It's been said that a writer only begins a book; it is the reader who completes it. This is true of writers, but it's also especially true of a photographer like Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Indeed, as one of Meatyard’s best friends, the writer Guy Davenport once observed, many of Meatyard’s photographs are like “charming short stories that have never been written.” 

Although Meatyard toyed with a kind of down-home surrealism, involving rubber masks and such, the best of his photographs from the sixties have a tender, genuinely poetic quality.
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Ralph Eugene Meatyard's photographs are visual koans.
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