Halfstory Halflife.

Photographs by Raymond Meeks. Designed by Bureau Kayser.

Chose Commune, Paris, France, 2018. 144 pp., 79 black-and-white illustrations, 8½x11".

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2018 by:

Terri Weifenbach

Shortlisted for the 2018 Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook of the Year Award

Over the course of multiple summers, Raymond Meeks has 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.

Raymond Meeks (b.1963 Ohio) lives and works in the Hudson Valley, New York.His pictures have been exhibited at galleries including Fotomuseum Den Haag (Holland), Candace Dwan in New York and Camera Obscura in Paris. His work is housed in public and private collections including the Bibliothèque Nationale (France), The National Gallery of Art, George Eastman House and the Museum of Modern Art Library. He is the co-founder of Orchard Journal and Dumbsaint and the author of over twenty-four commercially and self-published books. His most recent collaborative journal, Township, (along with Tim Carpenter, Adrianna Ault and Brad Zellar) was nominated for the 2018 International Photobook Award at Kassel. Meeks is represented by Wouter van Leeuwen in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

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