The photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard defy convention: they have been called visionary, surrealistic and meditative. These evocative images of friends and family and of the natural world around his home show a delicate psychology of human interaction. Trained as an optician, a profession he kept all his life in Kentucky, he bought a camera in 1950 to photograph his first-born son, joined the Lexington Camera Club and became friends with his teacher Van Deren Coke and a circle of writers and photographers including Guy Davenport, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, Jonathan Williams and Minor White. Family and friends took part freely in his mysterious staged images, which often involve masks and abandoned spaces and obliquely refer to social, political and cultural issues. The natural environment is a key subject: in the Light on Water series long exposures seem to create calligraphic texts; in No-Focus he deliberately photographed stems and twigs out of focus; in one of his last series, Motion-Sound, he moved the camera gently, creating multiple exposures of woodland scenes that suggest abstract sound patterns. The book accompanies an exhibition organised at ICP with the writer and friend Guy Davenport.