Website review: George Eastman House Ralph Eugene M...
invertebra discovered this in Photography
•3 reviews since Mar 2, 2004
photography
•geh.org/ne/str085/htmlsrc8/meatyard_sld00001....
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Hapax rated 3 months ago- ralph eugene meatyard maskings An encyclopedia entry on his life might read like this: "Born in Normal, Illinois, in 1925, the eldest of two sons, Meatyard attended Williams College as part of the Navy's V12 program in World War II. Following the war, he married, became a licensed optician, and moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he eventually opened his own shop, Eyeglasses of Kentucky. When the first of his three children was born, Meatyard bought a camera to make pictures of the baby. Quickly, photography became a consuming interest. He joined the Lexington Camera Club, where he met Van Deren Coke, under whose encouragement he soon developed into a powerfully original photographer. Attending to professional obligations during the week, he photographed only on weekends. Through Minor White, whom he met at a workshop organized by Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University in 1956, he became interested in Zen, which then became a major influence on his photography. An eclectic and voracious reader, Meatyard became close friends with poets and writers, including Guy Davenport, Wendell Berry, Jonathan Williams, and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Meatyard's work became well known and was exhibited widely within the United States and abroad. In 1972, he died of cancer, a week before his forty seventh birthday." For thirty years, something like this sketch has held Meatyard's place in photo histories, but, like the fixation on the mask from which Lucybelle has suffered, it also has confined appreciation of his achievement. A sketch, even a rather full one like this, inevitably leaves unanswered questions, shadings to be filled in, and, often unthinkingly, we complete the picture with short hand notions of our ownabout the South, about Zen, about dying young, about a tradesman who was also an important artist. As yet we don't have a full biographical critical study of Meatyard, but in a good one the details about Meatyard's life, his reading, his thinking about Zen, his leadership in the Lexington Camera Club, and the rest of the facts sketched here would reveal an artist of far greater depth and importance than the one the sketch portrays. How do I know this? If a careful analysis of Lucybelle does nothing else, it helps us get past the Meatyard of myth and legend into a fuller understanding of an artist very much worth serious critical attention. Moreover, since Lucybelle draws directly on the artist's life as the material here transformed into what Meatyard saw as a photographic poem, to probe its meaning and how it operates necessarily involves investigating some aspects of Meatyard's biography in more detail. One doesn't learn much about his early days growing up in Normal, Illinois, about his playing the accordion in the high school band, about his acting in plays and forming a fraternity, though these would figure importantly in a full biography. The "life" Lucybelle elevates begins later. In its fiction, Lucybelle offers a picture of the mature artist the artist as he saw himself and as he sought to be seen. Lucybelle shows us something of his inner life, the springs of his sensibility, and his values expressed as he always expressed them, through what was in his hands photography's eloquent vernacular. Source
- dodgystef rated 29 months ago
Some of Ralph Eugene Meatyard's work at George Eastman House.
Also has a few of the images from "The Familyalbum of Lucybelle Crater"
