SOUTHAMPTON, L.I.— Using photography to create abstract images and allude to spiritual matters might seem somewhat perverse, like trying to play a violin with a hammer. But as a marvelous exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton demonstrates, that's precisely what Ralph Eugene Meatyard did with remarkable success, in the course of a short but brilliant career.

Meatyard, who died in 1972 at the age of 46, is one of the most interesting, if underknown, figures in recent photography. In the 1960's, working in scraps of time left over from his job as an optician in Lexington, Ky., Meatyard managed to produce some of the most far-reaching photographs being done anywhere at the time.

In pictures that consistently challenged photography's customary role as a recorder of reality, Meatyard used staged tableaux, deliberate camera movement, lack of focus and other unusual tactics to push the medium to depict what he saw as the spiritual dimension of existence. The resulting images mix photographic Modernism, of the sort practiced by Alfred Stieglitz and later artists, with dollops of Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism and Zen philosophy, to create a blend that is Meatyard's own.

Among Meatyard's best-known works are unsettling photographs he took of his children posing with various props and costumes in abandoned houses. Meatyard treated these decrepit buildings like stage sets for home-grown existential dramas.

In one image, a nervous-looking boy in a hooded sweatshirt stands beneath a pickax buried to its handle in an ornately papered wall. In another, two boys sit in the shadows next to a bright rectangle of light from a nearby window; one of the boys is slumped over the other, who has a cord wrapped nooselike around his neck.

Meatyard bought his first camera in 1950, to photograph his child, and was soon deeply immersed in the medium. He took workshops at the Lexington Camera Club with Van Deren Coke, Minor White, Aaron Siskind and other photographers, and by the late 1950's was exhibiting his photographs around the country.

Meatyard's interest in using photographs to point beyond physical reality, as well as his involvement in Zen, reflects White's influence. Over the years, Meatyard employed a variety of formal devices to try to reduce the seeming solidity of the people and objects he depicted.

One way he did this was to photograph moving subjects using long shutter speeds, so that their images would be blurred. Often he would have his models simply turn their heads from side to side while he took their pictures, to obscure their features; for a series he began in 1957 and pursued until his death, he photographed sunlight reflected off rivers or ponds, producing images in which white electric scribbles seem to float above the black water.

In 1958, Meatyard began what he called his "No-Focus" pictures, in which he threw his lens severely out of focus in order to break down the images into biomorphic blobs of black and white. In another series from this same period, the "Zen Twigs," he photographed branches in closeup, leaving only one small area in focus while everything else is reduced to smudges and haze; these pictures have a delicate precision, with the twigs slicing through the photographs like three-dimensional calligraphy.

Like Surrealist photographers of the 1930's, Meatyard often used dolls and masks in his work to render his subjects both strange and universal. In one particularly Surrealist work, he photographed a man with an artificial arm and an armless mannequin flanking a blank mirror; in another, he photographed four children wearing horrifically distorted Halloween masks sitting in a stadium, surrounded by the row numbers painted on the worn wooden bleachers.

Masks play a central role in Meat yard's last major series, "The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater," most of which he produced after he contracted the cancer that eventually killed him. In these pictures he played with snapshot conventions, photographing his wife, Madelyn, posing with various family members and friends, all wearing ugly masks.

Meatyard's handwritten captions identify both people in each picture as Lucybelle Crater (the name is derived from a Flannery O'Connor story in which an old woman introduces both herself and her daughter as Lucynell Crater). In the culminating photograph, Meatyard and his wife appear in a grape arbor, he wearing her clothes and mask, while she wears his.

Meatyard had the bad luck to die just as the art world was beginning to rediscover photography after decades of neglect. Despite occasional shows of his pictures in recent years, his work has not received the attention it deserved until this valuable exhibition, which was organized by Barbara Tannenbaum for the Akron (Ohio) Art Institute, where it was shown last year.

It's an indication of the curious state of photography in New York City these days that despite the recent surge of interest in the medium, no major New York museum booked this important show. Praise to the Parrish for doing so, and for thereby bringing a wide selection of Meat yard's lyrical and challenging pictures to a New York area audience.

"Ralph Eugene Meatyard: An American Visionary" remains at the Parrish Art Museum, 25 Job's Lane, Southampton, L.I., through Jan. 23.

Photo: Ralph Eugene Meatyard's untitled photograph of a twig from 1963, part of his Zen series. (Parrish Art Museum)