Ralph Eugene Meatyard - Ralph Eugene Meatyard - 1974

FANTASTIC MONOGRAPH from 1974 (!) by American Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972), who is responsible for one of the most important photobooks ever published: "The family album of Lucybelle Crater" (Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books, page 230 and 231), which was published same year (1974).

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"I wish to express my thanks to Michael Hoffman and Minor White for their help in the preparation of this book; and to Madelyn and Christopher Meatyard, and Bob May. And most especially to Shawn Watson, whose understanding of Gene Meatyard's work, and much else besides, has been an inspiration to me; the retrospective show of his photographs that she hung at Matrix in Hartford served as a model for the selection and sequencing of the images in this book."
- James Baker Hall -

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Aperture, New York. 1974. First edition, first printing.

Hardcover. 240 x 275 mm. 124 pages. Photos: Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Design: Véronique Lipsey. Edited with text by James Baker Hall. Reminiscence by Guy Davenport. Text in English.

Condition:
Inside very fresh and clean with no marks and with no foxing. Outside with little trace of use, but with no remarkable flaws or defects. Lacks the jacket. Overall fine condition.

Great photo monograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

"Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an American photographer from Normal, Illinois, U.S. Meatyard was born in Normal, Illinois in May 1925 and raised in the nearby town of Bloomington. When he turned 18 during World War II, he joined the United States Navy, though he did not serve overseas before the war ended. After leaving the force he attended Williams College under the GI Bill, and briefly studied pre-dentistry, before training to become an optician.
He moved with his new wife Madelyn to Lexington, Kentucky to continue working as an optician for Tinder-Krausse-Tinder, a company which also sold photographic equipment. The owners of the company were active members of the Lexington Camera Club, for which the Art Department of the University of Kentucky provided exhibition space.
Meatyard purchased his first camera in 1950 to photograph his newborn first child, and subsequently worked primarily with a Rolleiflex 6cm square medium-format camera. He joined the Lexington Camera club and the Photographic Society of America in 1954. At the Lexington Camera Club he met Van Deren Coke, who exhibited work by Meatyard in an exhibition for the university entitled "Creative Photography" in 1956.
During the mid-1950s, Meatyard attended a series of summer workshops run by Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University, and also with Minor White, who fostered Meatyard's interest in Zen philosophy.
An autodidact and voracious reader, Meatyard worked in productive bursts, often leaving his film undeveloped for long stretches, then working feverishly in the makeshift darkroom in his home. "His approach was somewhat improvisational and very heavily influenced by the jazz music of the time." He used his children in his work addressing the surreal "masks" of identity.
Much of his work was made in abandoned farmhouses in the central Kentucky bluegrass region during family weekend outings and in derelict spaces around Lexington. Some of his earliest camera work was made in the traditionally African-American neighborhood around Lexington's Old Georgetown Street.
Meatyard was a close acquaintance of several well-known writers in the Kentucky literary renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, including his neighbor Guy Davenport, who later helped compile a posthumous edition of his photos. In 1971, Meatyard co-authored a book on Kentucky's Red River Gorge, The Unforeseen Wilderness, with writer Wendell Berry. The two frequently traveled into the Appalachian foothills. Berry and Meatyard's book contributed to saving the gorge from destruction by a proposed Army Corps of Engineers dam.[citation needed] Meatyard's ashes were scattered in the gorge after his death.
Meatyard was also a friend and correspondent of Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton, who lived at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery just west of Bardstown, Kentucky. Merton appeared in a number of Meatyard's experimental photographs taken on the grounds of the monastery, and they shared an interest in literature, philosophy, and Eastern and Western spirituality.[citation needed] Meatyard wrote Merton's eulogy in the Kentucky Kernel shortly after his death in Bangkok, Thailand, in December 1968. Meatyard died four years later, in 1972, of cancer.
Though Lexington was not a well-established center of photography, Meatyard did not consider himself a "Southern" or regional photographer. His work was beginning to be recognized nationally at the time of his death, shown and collected by some prominent museums and published in magazines. He exhibited with photographers including Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Minor White, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, and Eikoh Hosoe. By the late 1970s, his photographs appeared mainly in exhibitions of 'southern' art, but have since attracted renewed interest. His best-known photography featured dolls and masks, or family, friends and neighbors pictured in abandoned buildings or in ordinary suburban backyards.
Meatyard married Madelyn McKinney. They had three children: Michael (born 1950); Melissa (born 1959); and Christopher (born 1955). Meatyard died of cancer in 1972. He was described as a "bookish Zenmaster [who] also served as president of the local PTA and the Little League and flipped burgers at the Fourth of July party."
(Wikipedia)

"James Baker Hall, a photographer and a writer, was a friend of Gene Meatyard's. This monograph was begun in 1970, with Meatyard's approval, and finished after his death, with his wife Madelyn's assistance and blessing. Hall has been experimenting for some time now with more or less uncommon ways to bring words and pictures together; his text here, a series of free-floating prose poems based on his observations of Meatyard as a man and as an artist and on certain of his own childhood experiences, attempts to create a context in which the photographer's vision will be more readily accessible. Hall has taught photography at M.I.T. and at the University of Connecticut; his pictures have been published and exhibited widely. He is the author of a novel, Yates Paul, His Grand Flights, His Tootings, and numerous stories, poems, articles, and reviews which have appeared in such magazines as Popular Photography, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Quarterly, Field, and Place. Currently he is teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky."
(from the publisher)

"Guy Davenport, also a friend of Meatyard's, provides a reminiscence. Poet, story writer, critic, scholar, translator, he is the author of The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz, Carmina Archilochi, Sappho, and a book of poems, Flowers and Leaves; a volume of his short stories entitled Tatlin! will be published soon by Scribner's. His articles and reviews have appeared in such periodicals as The Hudson Review, The New York Times Book Review, Life, and Poetry. He is a Professor of English at the University of Kentucky."
(from the publisher)