Ralph Eugene Meatyard was born in Normal, Illinois, in 1925 and lived in Lexington, Kentucky, where he earned his living as an optician. Working outside mainstream photography, he created images largely consisting of symbolic dramas staged in ordinary, often abandoned places and performed mainly by his own family. Together, his photographs seem to embody the belief that revelation does not depend on sight.
 
The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater is Meatyard's swansong, made largely in the two years before his death from cancer in 1972.
 
The series comprises 64 portraits of "Lucybelle Crater", a name adapted from a character in a Flannery O'Connor story. In each image, Meatyard's wife Madelyn plays Lucybelle wearing a dime-store witch mask, accompanied by relatives or friends in a second, transparent mask that ages its wearers. The sequence follows an ordinary family album's structure, beginning with immediate family, extending to other relationships and finally to a wider circle of friends. Meatyard clearly intended viewers not to need each person's identity, giving every character the same name: Lucybelle Crater. In the final photograph, made shortly before his death, he and his wife exchange clothes and masks in the garden where the first image was taken.
 
Long out of print, the Lucybelle photobook has exerted enormous influence and acquired an almost legendary reputation since its posthumous publication in 1974. This will be the first exhibition of the complete vintage set of The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater.