A Geography of Abandonment (2022) Special edition [Signed]

Photos, design and text by Raymond Meeks
SPECIAL EDITION:
30 copies numbered and signed: the book inside an handmade woodbox + a silver gelatine print by the author (18x26cm)
Handmade by Origini edizioni
250 copies numbered and signed (ON THE COVER)
Each writing by pencil is not printed but writes by hand by the author.
105 pages, 37 photos 4 colours and 36 photos b/w
Closed book dimensions: 18x26 cm
Handmade filo-refe binding.
An handmade leporello Risograph printed inside the book
Photos by Adrianna Ault
Printing and handmade by Concretipo Firenze.

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.

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.