Raymond Meeks (Ohio, 1963) has been recognized for his photographs and photo books centered on family and place. Meeks is an American photographer and it was stated that “Much of his work focuses on memory and place, and captures daily life with his family.” He has published a number of books including Pretty Girls Wander (2011) which “chronicles his daughter’s journey from adolescence to adulthood”; and Ciprian Honey Cathedral (2020), which contains symbolic, figurative photographs taken in and around a new house, and of his partner just before waking from sleep.

Meeks stated once that “I’ll work for a while making pictures, most often within walking distance of my backyard—observations and occurrences that make up the fabric of daily life, so that I make work where I find myself wanting to spend time with a person or a subject, oftentimes dictated by the type of experiences that I want to have in the world.”

He shoots in color and black-and-white, working primarily with a film-based camera, hand printing from negatives in his own darkroom, and often binding his prints together into handcrafted books.

Photobook – Halfstory Halflife

Within Meeks photobook, he observed the energy and atmosphere over the course of three years coming from the presence of a group of kids jumping from a cliff into a waterfall below; the spectacle of the wait, the anticipation of the climb and the final leap into darkness, where time comes to a standstill as bodies are frozen in motion. These everyday experiences and rituals, simple and carefree in their nature, gain a weight and significance through the lens, as the bodies fall somewhere beyond the threshold of youth and into adulthood.

In a presentation from Chose Commune, they make the statement of “Meeks ventured the few miles from his rural home in the Catskill Mountain region of New York, to a single-lane bridge spanning the tributaries of Bowery and Catskill Creeks. Beneath the bridge, a waterfall drops sixty-feet over moss-covered limestone toward a forbidding pond.”

“The local youth have come here from time immemorial, congregating near outcroppings and around a concrete altar – a remnant of an earlier stone bridge. Most allow themselves a brief running start before launching their pale bodies into the void, where tentative suggestions of flight mark the response to gravity. Taken collectively, their gestures allude to ritual, a prayerful response to the exigencies of budding sexuality and a future rife with uncertainty.”

“Halfstory Halflife is a distillation of the photographs made in the shadows of these falls, marked each summer by the emergence of young adults perched at a precipice both in space and in their lives.”

In an interview with Raymond Meeks and Sophie Wright, Meeks highlights the story behind the book and how he was able to take these photos produced within it.

Meeks stated about his book: “The more I got to know the kids there, the more they wanted to give me something and perform. What I ended up deferring to was less engagement. I would do just enough to let them know this is who I am, this is what I’m doing and then offering prints in exchange. A lot of the kids would do stunts. I knew that’s what they wanted to do, so I would photograph them, go home, make a digital print, and give them the prints of it. Then I would just have to tell them, “Thank you for that. That’s not what I wanted. Do what you do.”

Meeks went on to make a statement about his experience with allowing the photos to distill: “It was ritual. I was raised Catholic, so these rock outcroppings to me were like altars. These bodies leaping into the dark void almost became like this sacrament. I feel like each generation has to pay for the sins of the previous generation. They were almost offering up their bodies and it’s the process of evolving by way of ritual—that process of coming of age, something that’s been going on at this specific place for as long as people can remember.”

Image analysis

I have decided to analyse this image as I particularly enjoy the aesthetic it is portraying and just the overall layout to the image itself. I like how complex the image looks with the several varieties of plants that are scattered all over the photograph as they provide different patterns that create a complicated yet eye-catching image. The contrast between rural and urban areas really was what intrigued me as the two don’t mix as one is natural and one is man made. The two contrasting areas of both rural and urban photography together, creates a good juxtaposition for the image.

I believe that this image fits mainly within the theme of complex due to so much going on with the vast variety of plants and objects. There are many different textures and details that are expressed through the huge array of greenery that is displayed within the photograph. I also believe that by the image being in black and white, it is able to showcase the textures more prominently as they’re dramatically enhanced rather than colliding with each other with colour.