Published by University of Kentucky Art Museum. Edited with text by Stuart Horodner, Janie M. Welker. Text by Roger Ballen, Julian Cox, Emmet Gowin, Marvin Heiferman, Corey Keller, Judy Linn, Christopher Meatyard, Duane Michals, Andrea Modica, Laurel Nakadate, Catherine Opie.
Stages for Being examines the photography that Ralph Eugene Meatyard created in and around Lexington, Kentucky, where he found abandoned houses in the countryside to use as sets, and directed friends and family members in scenes that suggest both ritual and theater. Establishing mood with natural lighting, he used masks, dolls and found objects as unsettling props and mined architectural detail for abstract compositional elements.
Meatyard culled inspiration from a wide variety of sources. An autodidact in areas as diverse as jazz, painting, literature, history and Zen Buddhism, his voracious reading sparked endless ideas for his carefully constructed photographs. His process was also informed by consistent dialogue with a robust group of Kentucky peers, including the writer, environmental activist and farmer Wendell Berry; photographers Van Deren Coke and Robert C. May; the Trappist monk Thomas Merton; the painter Frederic Thursz; and the writer, poet and philosopher Guy Davenport, all of whom worked in the region but were engaged with contemporary ideas and practice in their fields.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–72) 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. When the first of his three children was born, Meatyard bought a camera to make pictures of the baby. Photography quickly 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. Meatyard's work is housed at the Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, the Smithsonian Institution and many other important collections.
PUBLISHER University of Kentucky Art Museum
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9.5 x 9.5 in. / 112 pgs / 50 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 3/19/2019 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2019 p. 76
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781882007004TRADE List Price: $45.00 CAD $62.00 GBP £40.00
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Published by Fraenkel Gallery. By Alexander Nemerov.
The legendary, mysterious photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–72) lived in Lexington, Kentucky, working in a close-knit community of artists and writers while making his living as an optician. Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic, by esteemed art historian Alexander Nemerov, is a groundbreaking study of Meatyard’s work, creative thinking and sources of inspiration.
Given rare access to the personal library in which Meatyard had tellingly annotated works of fiction, poetry and other pages of personal significance, Nemerov examines the artist’s process of creating characters and staging dreamlike scenes. American Mystic also considers the artists and writers whose work influenced Meatyard, such as William Blake, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Thomas Merton.
Meatyard’s celebrated series The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater and many of his other photographs cast family members and friends in central roles, often masked and enacting symbolic dramas. Of these mystical works, Nemerov writes, “For Meatyard, a photograph is a careful or casual arrangement meant to produce a feeling it cannot name.”
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Edited by James Rhem.
Originally published in 1974 by the Jargon Society and long out of print, The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater is the best-known body of Ralph Eugene Meatyard's work. At once comic and tragic, grotesque and beautiful, the series of 64 images features his wife, Madelyn, in a hag's Halloween mask together in each with a different friend or relative in a transparent mask. Original copies of this small but seminal work now sell for upwards of $500. Critic and scholar James Rhem has worked closely with the archives in the photographer's estate, as well as directly with his surviving family members to reconstruct Meatyard's original, and unrealized, intentions for the publication of this project. As a result, this revised edition features the correct sequencing of images and, most importantly, the missing captions, which, in accordance with Meatyard's instructions, are reproduced in his own handwriting as white type knocked out of a black background. In addition, each surviving participant in the Lucybelle Crater project has been interviewed by Rhem, and the book includes a critical essay and extensive background information. Accompanying the Album are 40 more figurative works establishing a context for it and exploring important themes in Meatyard's work. This is an important rediscovery in the history of American photography.