synopsis
In Geography of Abandonment, Raymond Meeks explores the elastic nature and meaning of home and place. Place to become, dwell within, leave and return to. “Place” imbued with memory, present reality, as well as the unknowns posed by the future. Meeks reveals his fascination with the ritualistic processes that inform notions of transcendence and grief. Our departures from home as a necessary abandoning while finding our way in the world, being returned to the emptiness of pure existence.
Meeks’ work is informed by a constant recalibration between inner and outer world, the canny and the uncanny, the particular and the universal. In his hands, the camera is an instrument that dissects ritual and renders form, briefly making the world around us comprehensible, and rendering us comprehensible to ourselves. His personal and professional relationship with the photographer Adrianna Ault has been a primary source of inspiration and collaboration for Meeks over the years. Both artists struggle with the notion of personal meaning, especially as the years pass, children leave, and their own relationship with each other shifts and evolves. Meeks watches his partner, and poetically observes:
She seems to be expecting something, some form she could take possession of.
A borrowed form, perhaps, one that could express the real pain inside.
An absolute breaking and repurposing of truth.
A place where truth could be gotten at, but also where truth could be defended.
An absolute breaking and repurposing of truth.
A place where truth could be gotten at, but also where truth could be defended.
A burning experience of molding herself.
A sudden glimpse of her own being.
A sudden glimpse of her own being.
His photographs of Ault, and the photographs they have made together, convey a restlessness astir within the quotidian, a condition manifest in his work, and the experimental nature of his photographic approach and processes.
technical information
publisher : Origini edizioni
2022
250 copies numbered and signed (on the cover)
105 pages, 37 photos in color and 36 photos in b/w
dimensions: 18x26 cm
2022
250 copies numbered and signed (on the cover)
105 pages, 37 photos in color and 36 photos in b/w
dimensions: 18x26 cm
about Raymond Meeks
Raymond Meeks (Ohio, 1963) has been recognized for his books and pictures centered on memory and place, the way in which a landscape can shape an individual and, in the abstract, how a place possesses you in its absence. His books have been described as a field or vertical plane for examining interior co-existences, as life moves in circles and moments and events—often years apart—unravel and overlap, informing new meanings.
Raymond Meeks lives and works in the Hudson Valley (New York). His work is represented in numerous private and public collections. He is the sixth laureate of Immersion, a French-American photography commission sponsored by Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. Exhibitions from this commission are scheduled for New York (ICP September, 2023) and Paris (Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson September, 2024). The Inhabitants, a book made in collaboration with writer George Weld, was published in August 2023 by MACK.
Raymond Meeks is a 2020 recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography and was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022.
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book in my collection
publisher : Origini edizioni
2022
250 copies numbered and signed (on the cover)
2022
250 copies numbered and signed (on the cover)