Meatyard was born in
Normal, Illinois in May 1925 and raised in the nearby town of
Bloomington. When he turned 18 during
World War II, he joined the
United States Navy, though he did not serve overseas before the war ended. After leaving the force he attended
Williams College under the
GI Bill, and briefly studied pre-dentistry, before training to become an
optician. He moved with his new wife Madelyn to
Lexington, Kentucky to continue working as an optician for Tinder-Krausse-Tinder, a company which also sold photographic equipment. The owners of the company were active members of the Lexington Camera Club, for which the Art Department of the
University of Kentucky provided exhibition space. Meatyard purchased his first camera in 1950 to photograph his newborn first child, and subsequently worked primarily with a
Rolleiflex 6cm square medium-format camera. He joined the Lexington Camera club and the
Photographic Society of America in 1954. At the Lexington Camera Club he met
Van Deren Coke, who exhibited work by Meatyard in an exhibition for the university entitled "Creative Photography" in 1956. During the mid-1950s, Meatyard attended a series of summer workshops run by
Henry Holmes Smith at
Indiana University, and also with
Minor White, who fostered Meatyard's interest in
Zen philosophy. An autodidact and voracious reader, Meatyard worked in productive bursts, often leaving his film undeveloped for long stretches, then working feverishly in the makeshift darkroom in his home. "His approach was somewhat improvisational and very heavily influenced by the
jazz music of the time." He used his children in his work addressing the surreal "masks" of identity. Much of his work was made in abandoned farmhouses in the central Kentucky bluegrass region during family weekend outings and in derelict spaces around Lexington. Some of his earliest camera work was made in the traditionally
African-American neighborhood around Lexington's Old Georgetown Street. Meatyard was a close acquaintance of several well-known writers in the Kentucky literary renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, including his neighbor
Guy Davenport, who later helped compile a posthumous edition of his photos. In 1971, Meatyard co-authored a book on Kentucky's
Red River Gorge,
The Unforeseen Wilderness, with writer
Wendell Berry. The two frequently traveled into the Appalachian foothills. Berry and Meatyard's book contributed to saving the gorge from destruction by a proposed
Army Corps of Engineers dam. Meatyard's ashes were scattered in the gorge after his death. Meatyard was also a friend and correspondent of Catholic monk and writer
Thomas Merton, who lived at the
Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery just west of
Bardstown, Kentucky. Merton appeared in a number of Meatyard's experimental photographs taken on the grounds of the monastery, and they shared an interest in literature, philosophy, and Eastern and Western spirituality. Meatyard wrote Merton's eulogy in the
Kentucky Kernel shortly after his death in
Bangkok, Thailand, in December 1968. Meatyard died four years later, in 1972, of cancer. ==Photography==