Raymond Meeks speaks with David Campany

Lieu-Dit, Fondation d'entreprise Hermès, 2024

Raymond Meeks talks with David Campany, on the occasion of Meeks’ exhibition The Inhabitants, part of the Immersion commission, sponsored by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, October 9, 2024 – January 5, 2025

Published in Lieu-Dit magazine

David: Raymond, you are known for working in American places familiar to you. With your Immersion project The Inhabitants you entered landscapes of migrant movement into and out of France. What adjustments did you need to make?

Raymond: This was likely the most pressing concern for me. I followed instinct and eventually landed in a corner of France that offered some measure of familiarity.  The London Plain trees near the border with Spain recalled Ohio forests and rivers I played in as a boy. From this, I began working my way outward, finding a visual rapport with what was new, recognizing forms and transitory patterns in a landscape that reflected upon the migratory presence of others. I sought places that offered an inherent tension, or where a residue of movement was still present. Places where not much of anything was happening became a receptive backdrop for inner projections of emotional states. I was carrying stories from asylum seekers that I’d gathered while volunteering with an aid agency, and while visiting refugee encampments.  All of this shaped what I was photographing, intuitively. 

David: The book of The Inhabitants is a collaboration with the writer George Weld. What was your working relationship?  

Raymond: Before the six-month residency, I spoke with George about collaborating, without fixing any ideas for how image and text might come together. In past projects, I might’ve followed an impulse for making pictures which included a human subject, but doing so here introduced all kinds of dilemmas and ultimately, I wasn’t able to reconcile the “why’s” for doing so. The absence of a human figure left space for the viewer’s imagination, especially with George’s writing invoking a presence, a voice. We had thought about George visiting Calais, but were concerned the writing might take on a documentary feel, relaying actual events. He remained in New York doing research, reading, forming questions, developing a level of compassion with which to respond to the pictures I was making.  Eventually we spread prints on the floor of my studio, attuning ourselves to what was rising from the work. It became apparent that few single pictures should announce themselves too loudly, where the color or a composition might overpower quieter images.  George was attempting the same mid-tonal range, not too soft or bold. This allowed a space for image and text to merge, gracefully.    

David: You have been crafting prints on recovered materials, and using sculptural elements and found images. 

Raymond:  While searching my attic for bookmaking materials, I realized I’d been hoarding paper and books for repurposing, as well as darkroom chemistry, silver gelatin papers and film. I decided to use what I had access to, as this seemed more fitting to a migratory, refugee experience of re-use, of making with found or adapted materials.  From these limitations new possibilities were born. It meant piecing together smaller sheets of paper to create larger images.  David, I recall how you described the work evoking “restlessness”. It was a restless search for a form born of my experience making the images in France. The further I moved into making, printing, crafting the works, the more attached I became, not wanting to surrender any part of the process. 

David: So much takes place in the subtle tones of your images; nuances of information and emotion that encourage slow looking and open response.

Raymond:  I can’t think of a more redeeming quality for what I hope for in a work of art than that.  An open response encouraged by sufficient ambiguity contained within the framing of form and content, and by what is left out of the work. It’s especially gratifying that you link “emotion” and “information”.  In the end we don’t know how the objects we make will register with a viewer. 

David: Will a Paris audience respond to your work in a different way to New York? 

Raymond: I’m in the midst of shaping the work for Paris, along with HCB curator Clément Cheroux, figuring out how the images we choose will be expressed by way of material choices, sizes and framing. I prefer to imagine any response to this project being grounded in universal humanity.  Whatever I make will be rooted and generated by feeling (mine), and response will rely on the willingness and ability for me to connect, in visual form, with another human being, despite cultural differences. To summon feeling, this is my hope.