As the nation celebrates its 250th, Undermainarts.org brings to this history party the stories of selected Kentucky artists whose works have gained national recognition. 

February, 2026

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Jamais Vu
Creator of one of the strangest bodies of work ever produced by an American photographer

By KEVIN NANCE

Contributing Writer

To anyone paying no more than casual attention, Ralph Eugene Meatyard looked as normal as they come. Working five and a half days a week at Eyeglasses of Kentucky, his optical shop in Lexington, he earned a comfortable middle-class living for his wife and three children, then devoted Saturday afternoons and Sundays to photography, a common hobby in mid-20th-century America. “A smiling, affable man of middle age and height,” as his friend Guy Davenport described him, Meatyard attended PTA meetings, coached his kids’ Little League teams, dressed conservatively and kept his hair neatly trimmed. That he hailed from Normal, Ill., seemed to fit.

That was Guy Mendes’s first impression when he first met Meatyard in 1967, but it didn’t last long. “I was a hippie with long hair and a beard in those days, and he was, like his photographer friend Bob May, really straight,” Mendes remembers now. “But then I looked at their pictures and thought, ‘These guys aren’t straight. They’re way out there.’” 

It was particularly true of Meatyard, who, in the decade before his untimely death in 1972, created one of the strangest bodies of work ever produced by an American photographer. In an era when most people thought of the medium as primarily photojournalistic, typified by the photo essays called “picture stories” showcased in the pages of Life and Look magazines, the largely self-taught Meatyard explored photography as an art form that went well beyond depicting reality as most of us see it. Often dark (literally and figuratively), surreal, sometimes playful and at other times sinister, his pictures stunned and sometimes perplexed viewers with their wild, poetic strangeness. Some were deeply experimental, using long exposures or double exposures, camera movement and other innovative techniques to suggest landscapes vibrating or ethereal figures wafting in and out of focus like ghosts. In his weirdest and best-known images, Meatyard staged fantastical scenarios in wooded areas or inside abandoned old houses, featuring his wife, children and friends wearing macabre masks and surrounded by dismembered dolls and other props.

“I didn’t know how to process the images at first, except that they were beautiful, and curious, and something I’d never seen,” Mendes recalls. “Photographs tend to fall into three categories: presque vu — you saw it before; deja vu — you think you’ve seen it before; and jamais vu — you’ve never seen it before. I came to think of Gene’s pictures as jamais vu.” 

His black-and-white prints, seen by relatively few during his lifetime, are now collected and exhibited in major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Meatyard has also had major retrospectives at the Akron Museum of Art in the early 1990s and the International Center of Photography in New York from 2004 to 2005. And more than a dozen books have been written about his work by scholars and curators throughout the art world.

“He was one of the most inventive and original photographers of the 20th century,” says Gregory Harris, curator of photography at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, whose current exhibition, “The Family Album of Ralph Eugene Meatyard,” continues through May 10.  The show, which marks Meatyard’s 100th birth year, displays a recently acquired set of prints first seen in the photographer’s self-titled monograph published by Kentucky’s Gnomon Press in 1970. “He was really trying out ways to use photography as an expressive medium, and move it away from a purely documentary tool,” Harris says. “Rather than a picture just being about what it’s showing, it’s meant to be a metaphor, or to evoke some kind of psychological or emotional state. There’s always the sense that not everything is as it appears. There’s always something lurking beneath the surface.”

Meatyard was not shy about showing his work, displaying his prints in the Eyeglasses of Kentucky waiting room and in exhibitions sponsored by the Lexington Camera Club (he was one of its leaders). He also shared it with his circle of friends including May and Mendes, Davenport (who used one of Meatyard’s photographs on the cover of his 1966 poetry collection “Flowers and Leaves”), Wendell Berry and Thomas Merton, whom they visited at the Abbey of Gethsemani in New Haven, Kentucky.