Lost in thought between the weeds and peeling walls

Leslie Camhi, in the Voice, reviews a major show of Ralph Eugene Meatyard's haunting, visionary work at New York's International Center of Photography: "Children, however beautiful or charming, are alien beings, especially to their parents, for whom close proximity renders their offspring's irreducible otherness unmistakable. The photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard understood this. His three children (two boys and a girl) were among his favorite models. In the 1950s and '60s, he liked to drive with them around his home city of Lexington, Kentucky, stopping his car beside an abandoned Southern Gothic mansion, and photographing them lost in thought between the weeds and peeling walls..."