The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater (Jargon 76)

Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an American photographer who lived in Lexington, Kentucky. His most famous works involved masks, worn by posing people, or ordinary objects. While he lived his work was shown and collected by major museums, published in important art magazines, and regarded by his peers as among the most original and disturbing imagery ever created with a camera. He exhibited with such well-known and diverse photographers as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. But by the late 1970s, his photographs seemed consigned to appear mainly in exhibitions of "southern" art. In the last decade, however, thanks in part to European critics, Meatyard's work has reemerged, and the depth of its genius and its contributions to photography have begun to be understood and appreciated. Everything about Meatyard's art ran counter to the usual and expected patterns. He was an optician, happily married, a father of three, president of the PTA, and coach of a boy's baseball team. His images had nothing to do with the gritty "street photography" of the east coast or the romantic view camera realism of the west coast. Meatyard took Fox Talbot's "pencil of nature" and drew calligraphic images with the sun's reflection on a black void of water. However, where others used these experiments to expand the possibilities of form in photographs, Meatyard consistently applied breakthroughs in formal design to the exploration of ideas and emotions. Finally-and of great importance in the development of his aesthetic-Meatyard created a mode of "No-Focus" imagery that was distinctly his own. Meatyard's death in 1972, a week away from his 47th birthday, came at the height of the "photo boom." Therefore, it was left to friends and colleagues to complete an Aperture monograph on Meatyard and carry through with the publication of The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater which he had laid out and sequenced before his death.