Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Stages for Being

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925 – 1972) made his living as an optician in Lexington while creating enigmatic photographs featuring friends and family members posed in abandoned places, often wearing masks or enacting symbolic gestures. “He picked the environment first,” Christopher Meatyard says of his father’s method. “Then he’d look at the particular light in that moment in that place, and start composing scenes using the camera.” Subjects were placed in the frame and given direction to move or stand still. The results are simultaneously tender, surreal, and theatrical.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.