High Museum spotlights ‘strait-laced business owner’ who made ‘crazy photographs’

When Lexington, Kentucky, photographer Guy Mendes was a student at the University of Kentucky in the ’60s and working on the student newspaper, he abided by the fundamental rules of journalistic news gathering: find out the who, what, where, when, why and how.

But that creed did not prepare him for an unanticipated question: the “huh?”

He experienced his initial “huh?” moment in 1968 when he first saw the work of renowned Lexington photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Known for his uncanny black-and-white photographs, often shot in abandoned or derelict spaces and featuring subjects whose faces were blurred or covered with masks, Meatyard’s photographs are experimental, slightly disorienting and continue to exert a powerful psychological pull even decades later.

“It changed my whole mindset about photography and what it was and could be. And I still appreciate that, because I’m still striving for that same kind of, you know, ‘huh?’” said Mendes, who remained friends with Meatyard until his death from cancer in 1972 at age 46.

Atlantans can experience their own “huh?” encounter with Meatyard’s ineffable photographs in the exhibition “The Family Album of Ralph Eugene Meatyard” at the High Museum, opening Dec. 12.

"You Can Trust Your Star," a portrait of Ralph Eugene Meatyard taken by his friend and fellow photographer and documentary filmmaker Guy Mendes. (Courtesy of Guy Mendes)

The exhibition, presented on the centennial of Meatyard’s birth, features 36 images that were contained in the photographer’s first monograph published in 1970. Meatyard’s son, Christopher Meatyard, maintains his father’s archives from his home in Lexington and said that this will be the first time the “Family Album” work will be shown in its entirety.

The people at the center of the “Family Album” photographs are Meatyard’s family — his wife, Madelyn, and children, Michael, Melissa and Christopher — as well as his confreres and collaborators: author Wendell Berry, Trappist monk Thomas Merton, poet Louis Zukofsky, photographer Cranston Ritchie and writer/illustrator Guy Davenport. Together, they made Lexington into a Southern-fried spin on the creative hub of Paris in the ’20s and ’30s.

A singular visionary in 20th-century photography, Meatyard paved the way for a host of influential photographers to come: Diane Arbus and, later, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson and Cindy Sherman, said Richard McCabe, who curated an exhibition of Meatyard’s work at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans in 2022.

Meatyard was deeply inspired by literature and also by the formal, storytelling possibilities of photography. His photographs of children are especially striking, filled with moody gravitas in moments that balance abstraction and clarity, sooty darkness and blazing white light. Children in Meatyard’s images tend to lurk in the shadows, unknowable and complex in a way that children are rarely represented. More than a representation of a person, the images suggest a rendition of a psychological state.

“There’s no fixed interpretation, but the image opens up to a variety of different possible interpretations,” said Christopher, “and that’s why he rarely titled his photographs … he left them open for the individual’s own creative imagination to contribute to the image.”

Meatyard came to photography later in life. While supporting his family as an optometrist, he explored his interest by joining the Lexington Camera Club. The waiting room at his business, Eyeglasses of Kentucky, doubled as a gallery displaying his own work and the work of contemporaries like Emmett Gowin.

"Untitled (plate 18)," from 1963 by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. (Courtesy of High Museum of Art)

“I thought they were really straight guys, until I saw their photographs,” said Mendes. “Their photographs were not straight. They were very dense. They were crooked in a very good kind of way. … ‘Jamais vu’ is something you never have seen,” he said, referring to the French term for the opposite of déjà vu — a situation where something familiar feels suddenly strange. “That was what Gene was after.”

“I think that’s the funny dichotomy of him, you know,” said McCabe. “He was such a strait-laced business owner. He made these crazy photographs that were just out in left field that were just indescribable at the time. People didn’t know how to take the work.”

Mendes remembers regularly driving out into the Kentucky countryside with Meatyard to take photographs. He said Meatyard kept a Virgin Mary figure on his dashboard, serendipitously guiding the way to their next adventure. Placing Mary on the right side of the dashboard meant the next turn would be a right, and on the left side, vice versa.

“I figured out later that it was a kind of purposeful meander, a way of losing yourself to find yourself,” said Mendes. “He was playful. He was willing to try this and try that.”

Christopher was often along for those rides and remembers loving the sense of exploration and adventure that came with them. “I was really enthusiastic to be involved in it. I appreciated the fact that he was making art … plus I got to explore these crazy abandoned mansions when he was looking around for a scene. I knew we were doing something different than what most other kids were involved in.”

Because of his approach to the art form, there is a timeless quality to Meatyard’s images.

“If you look at the work today, you don’t really get a sense that it’s archaic or dated to 50 or 60 years ago. It’s very relevant to our own times,” noted Christopher.

“He took photography beyond just a means of representing the world,” said McCable. “He went into fabricating the idea of ‘What is reality?’ and ‘What is the real world versus the fabricated or staged world?’”

For that reason, said McCabe, “his work still resonates as much as the day it was created. And 100 years on, he’s still, you know, we’re still talking about him and showing his work.”