Brooklyn Rail - Art Review - March 4, 2016
Ralph Eugene Meatyard, a married father of three children, was an optician who lived and worked in Lexington, Kentucky, where he owned an eyeglass shop called “Eyeglasses of Kentucky.” When he taught himself to use his first Rolleiflex, purchased in 1950, he uncovered a preternatural talent for photography. Up until his untimely death in 1972 (a week shy of his forty-seventh birthday), Meatyard dedicated his weekends to his hobby, touring the countryside with his wife and children in tow, finding abandoned barns and farmhouses where he could shoot ostensibly bucolic family images.