NEW YORK.- The International Center of Photography presents Ralph Eugene Meatyard. The photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972) defy convention: they have been called visionary, surrealistic, and meditative. Whatever the label, these evocative images of friends and family and the natural world around his home illustrate a delicate psychology of human interaction. Meatyard was trained as an optician, a profession he maintained all his life in Lexington, Kentucky; he only bought a camera in 1950 to photograph his first-born son. But soon he joined the Lexington Camera Club and developed a friendship with his photography teacher Van Deren Coke, as well as a circle of local writers and photographers, including Guy Davenport, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, Jonathan Williams, and Minor White. Family and friends freely participated in Meatyard’s mysterious staged images, which often involve masks and abandoned spaces, and obliquely reference social, political, and cultural issues. A key subject in Meatyard’s work is the natural environment, which is featured in his “Light on Water” series, in which long exposures seem to create calligraphic texts, and his “No-Focus” series, in which he deliberately photographed stems and twigs out of focus. In one of the last series he made, titled “Motion-Sound,” the pictures were made by moving the camera gently, creating multiple exposures of the woodland scenes that suggest abstract sound patterns. The exhibition is organized by Assistant Curator Cynthia Young, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue written by acclaimed writer Guy Davenport.