Ralph Eugene Meatyard

BY: Sacia Friedman and Liz MacDonald

Ralph Eugene Meatyard isn’t widely known outside the photography world, but he is considered a central figure to American visionary photography. His dreamlike images and experimental abstractions have had a major impact on contemporary photographers, an influence just beginning to be recognized nationally at the time of his death. Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic at San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery features over thirty works by this enigmatic photographer, alongside the artist’s notebooks and annotated volumes from his personal library.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard worked out of Lexington, Kentucky, where he made his living as an optometrist. But to categorize his work as outsider, fringe or southern gothic would be a mistake. Meatyard was part of a tight knit creative circle in Lexington that included writers, intellectuals, philosophers and photography mentors. He used his expertise in optometry to manipulate images, experimenting with shutter speeds, focus and multiple exposures. The resulting photographs elevate the captured image to a level of storytelling that includes much more than merely the objects in front of the camera. As one of his closest collaborators, poet and scholar Guy Davenport has put it, Meatyard’s best images resemble “short stories that have never been written.”

Most of Meatyard’s work was made in abandoned farmhouses in the central Kentucky bluegrass region and use his family members as subjects. The photographs are deliberately staged tableaux, often including masks and dolls. Meatyard’s children were primary to his themes of mortality, intimacy and unknowability, the surreal “masks” of identity and the ephemeral nature of surface matter. His images are at once matter of fact and enigmatic, with a surreal tension between what’s there and not there, pushing the boundaries of the medium’s customary role as a recorder of reality.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic will be on view at Fraenkel Gallery through May 6. You can view highlights from the exhibition here, above and below.