Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Untitled, ca. 1963
Collection of the International Center of Photography, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Traub, 1980

http://museum.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/meatyard/introduction.html

These staged images are almost literary in their implied narratives, what writer Guy Davenport has called “charming short stories that have never been written.” Although they present strange juxtapositions and embrace accidents, these unsettling pictures are not so much surrealistic as transcendental. With a quiet spiritual force, they suggest the complex emotions associated with childhood intimacy, innocence, loss, and destruction.