Ralph Eugene Meatyard

A Midwestern transplant to Lexington, KY, Meatyard (1925–1972) raised a family by working as an optician. Meanwhile, in the 1950s he began to create an extraordinary body of photographs that was far ahead of its time—especially in the way Meatyard treated the photograph as a fictional space, an idea that was to be elaborated upon by artists such as Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman.