More Real than Real: The Weird Localism of Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Wendell Berry

Abstract

This essay examines the work of Wendell Berry (academic, poet, and farmer, who is well known for his focus on the local) and the ucanny photography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. This essay argues that rather than simply a rehashing of the well-worn familar, or an encounter with alterity, both Berry's and Meatyard's work call neat distinctions between the familar and the strange into question. While residence tends to foster habitual perception and naturalising familiarity, Berry's and Meatyard's work suggests that increased intimacy unsettles habitual perception and reveals surprising and often monsterous aspects of familair beings and places. Their work attempts to affect perceptual 'quakes' that jars routinised senses of place and leads to views of place that surprise and even horrify. This essay is grounded in Berry's and Meatyard's collaborative work, The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge [1971] and Berry's essay 'The Rise'. 'More Real than Real' draws on the theoretical insights of Timothy Morton (specifically his concept of the 'strange stranger') along with Jean Luc Marion's theory of saturated phenomenon and his writings on nature of the idol.