A Commonplace Book

John Gossage curates an atypical selection of Meeks’ subdued, black-and-white photographs of the American landscape

Published with The Agency, Hudson Valley.

Hudson Valley–based photographer Raymond Meeks’ (born 1963) newest photobook has a special curator: John Gossage, a photographer who has been an enduring influence on Meeks, particularly in his framing techniques. Untethered from sequence or narrative, Gossage’s image selection unveils a breadth of visual style and approach, varied in form but unified by Meeks’ 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.” And so was born, in Gossage’s words, this 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.”