Meatyard/Merton - Merton/Meatyard: Photographing Thomas Merton [Meatyard, Ralph Eugene].

Ralph Eugene Meatyard was a optician by trade in Lexington, Kentucky, but was an avid photographer who would become influential in the art photography world for his haunting and surreal images. He first met Merton in January of 1967 on a trip from Lexington with poet Jonathan Williams and Guy Davenport (see Merton's journal entry from January 18, 1967). Meatyard took some photographs of Merton playing bongos, standing with a staff in a corn field, in his hermitage, in his habit but with a baseball cap, etc. In some of the last years of his life before dieing of cancer, he collaborating with another friend of Merton's, Kentucky author Wendell Berry. Meatyard's photographs are part of the collections at the Smithsonian, the Museum of Modern Art, and the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.