Steidlville

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Ralph Eugene Meatyard was born in May 1925 in Normal, Illinois. He graduated from Illinois State University in 1943 and entered the Navy a year later. Discharged in 1946, he married Madelyn McKinney, with whom he had three children, and started an apprenticeship as an optician. In 1950 he moved to Lexington, Kentucky, and began making photographs. Over the next ten years his work was shown in exhibitions nationally, including a show with Van Deren Coke at New York’s A Photographer’s Gallery in 1957 and a one-man show at Tulane University in New Orleans in 1959, the same year Aperture Magazine published a portfolio of his work. In 1967, he opened his own optical business, Eyeglasses of Kentucky. He died in 1972.