Raymond Meeks

Recipient of the Immersion program of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, American photographer Raymond Meeks spent a long time in France in the year 2022. He photographed in the South, on the border with Spain, and on the northern coast around Calais, two crossing points for asylum seekers on their way to England. He has chosen not to photograph the faces of the displaced, but rather the traces and residue of their itinerancy. There’s a shoe in the dirt, a blanket rolled up on the ground, a jacket hanging on the branches… Meeks is especially attentive to the inhospitable spaces migrants temporarily inhabit: ditches, embankments, motorway roadsides, riverbanks, wastelands and other non-places. Even when not directly visible, rivers are omnipresent in his images. These waterways might even act as a metaphor for migration flows. There are also many obstacles–stony embankments, concrete blocks, brambles or barbed wire–which might only suggest the plight of refugees on a daily basis. The Bourgeois de Calais, as sculpted by Auguste Rodin, also appear in the series, bearing witnessto the catastrophic history of the 100 Years’ War.
The project is accompanied by a text from American writer George Weld, who shares with Meeks’ photographs a similar approach marked by discretion and empathy.

Exhibition curator
Clément Chéroux
Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Inhabitants is Raymond Meeks’ first monographic exhibition in France.

Biography

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. Meeks lives and works in the Hudson Valley (New York). He is the sixth laureate of Immersion, a French-American photography commission sponsored by Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. 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.

Immersion

Immersion is designed to support contemporary photography in France and the United States. Initiated in 2014 by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, this Franco-American photographic commission is an annual program of cross-residencies, exhibitions and publications, alternatively open to a U.S.-based photographer wishing to work on an original project in France, mentored by an English-speaking professional, and, the following year, to a French-based photographer wishing to work on an original project in the U.S., mentored by a French professional. Each year, as part of an alliance established with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris and the International Center of Photography in New York (ICP), Immersion results in solo exhibitions held
at these two prestigious institutions. 

The sixth edition was sponsored by David Campany, Director of Programs at the ICP. Raymond Meeks completed his residency in France in 2022. The outcome of his work was presented at the ICP in September 2023, alongside the two previous winners, Vasantha Yogananthan (France) and Gregory Halpern (USA).