Ralph Eugene Meatyard was born in May 15 1925, in Illinois, he served in the US navy in WW2, he went to Williams college, but did not earn a degree. In 1949 he earned an optometry license, he got a job at the Tinder Krauss optical firm. He kept that job until he opened his own shop in 1967. In 1950 when he had his first child, he bought his first camera. Four years later he joined the Lexington camera club, where he met the American writer, curator, and photographer Van Deren Coke, who encouraged him to become a photographer. After he met Minor White and Gyorgy Keyes, he made his book on Zen photography called the Zen Twigs Series. Two years later he began his No-Focus photographs, he was also featured in the Aperture magazines. Throughout the 1960s, Meatyard traveled around with his family and took staged photographs, Meatyard was diagnosed with cancer in the 1970s, and he spent the last two years of his life working on the Lucybelle Crater Series, which was his wife wearing a mask of an old hag outdoors, and accompanied by a friend or relative wearing an old man mask. The entire series was posted later in 1974 posthumously as "The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater". Throughout his life he was with many well known writers and poets, including Wendell Berry,Jonathan Williams and Guy Davenport. Meatyard died at 46 in 1972.
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