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A Geography of Abandonment (special edition - book + print)

by Raymond Meeks

Photographs: Raymond Meeks

Publisher: Origini Edizioni

105 pages pages

Pictures: 37 photos 4 colours and 36 photos b/w

Year: 2022

Price: 800 €

Comments: Special Edition: 30 copies numbered and signed: the book inside an handmade wooden box + a gelatin silver print by the author (18x26cm). Book: Photos, design and text by Raymond Meeks. Handmade realization by Origini edizioni. 250 copies numbered and signed. Each writing by pencil is not printed but written by hand by the author. 18x26 cm. Handmade filo-refe binding. An handmade leporello Risograph printed inside the book. Photos by Adrianna Ault.

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.

A burning experience of molding herself.
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.

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look inside

A Geography of Abandonment (special edition - book + print)

by Raymond Meeks

Photographs: Raymond Meeks

Publisher: Origini Edizioni

105 pages pages

Pictures: 37 photos 4 colours and 36 photos b/w

Year: 2022

Price: 800 €

Comments: Special Edition: 30 copies numbered and signed: the book inside an handmade wooden box + a gelatin silver print by the author (18x26cm). Book: Photos, design and text by Raymond Meeks. Handmade realization by Origini edizioni. 250 copies numbered and signed. Each writing by pencil is not printed but written by hand by the author. 18x26 cm. Handmade filo-refe binding. An handmade leporello Risograph printed inside the book. Photos by Adrianna Ault.

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.

A burning experience of molding herself.
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.

More books by Raymond Meeks