Meeks, Raymond: A Commonplace Book

A Commonplace Book presents photographs by Raymond Meeks selected by John Gossage—a photographer who has been an enduring influence for Meeks, inspiring his approach and use of the camera to construct a picture—untethered from sequence or narrative continuity. Here to discover is a breadth of visual style and approach, varied in form, unified by a singular sensibility. Gossage’s initial impetus for the book was his realization that Meeks had “made some of the most stylistically various single pictures that I had ever seen in a serious photographer’s work.” Meeks then agreed to supply his pictures, from which Gossage made his edit and created a new context for them to be seen one at a time. And so was born, in Gossage’s words, this commonplace book “of remarkable things, pictures that are as rich individually as they are in the narrative of Ray’s books, but in a different way. They stand as convincing in a style of variation with certainty, always having the feel and thought of a single author.”