PHO150 Digital Photography: Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Stages for Being examines the photography that Ralph Eugene Meatyard created in and around Lexington, Kentucky, where he found abandoned houses in the countryside to use as sets, and directed friends and family members in scenes that suggest both ritual and theater. Establishing mood with natural lighting, he used masks, dolls and found objects as unsettling props and mined architectural detail for abstract compositional elements.

This catalog of a major traveling exhibition is the most comprehensive treatment and the first major survey of the work of photographer Meatyard (1925-72) since the books and exhibitions that appeared soon after his death.

Given rare access to the personal library in which Meatyard had tellingly annotated works of fiction, poetry and other pages of personal significance, Nemerov examines the artist's process of creating characters and staging dreamlike scenes. American Mystic also considers the artists and writers whose work influenced Meatyard, such as William Blake, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Thomas Merton.

The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater is the best-known body of Ralph Eugene Meatyard's work. At once comic and tragic, grotesque and beautiful, the series of 64 images features his wife, Madelyn, in a hag's Halloween mask together in each with a different friend or relative in a transparent mask. This revised edition features the correct sequencing of images and, most importantly, the missing captions, which, in accordance with Meatyard's instructions, are reproduced in his own handwriting as white type knocked out of a black background.

Featuring 250 photographs by over 150 different artists, this book surveys fine art photography in American throughout the 20th century.

This highly sensitive and beautifully written book looks closely at the way contemporary Western artists negotiate death, both as personal experience and in the wider community. Townsend discusses, but moves beyond, the ""spectacle of death"" in work by artists such as Damien Hirst to see how mortality--in particular the experience of other people's death--brings us face to face with profound ethical and even political issues. He looks at personal responses to death in the work of artists as varied as Francis Bacon, Tracey Emin and Derek Jarman, whose film Blue is discussed here in depth. Exploring the last body of work by the the Kentucky-based photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and Jewish American installation artist Shimon Attie's powerful memorial work for the community of Aberfan, Townsend considers death in light of the injunction to ""love they neighbor.""

In association with the Chrisler Museum Bringing together the words & images of seventy-five of the world's greatest photographers, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Steichen, Robert Mapplethorpe, & Sally Mann.