A common place by Raymond Meeks

A Commonplace Book is Raymond Meeks's photobook of photographs selected not by Meeks himself but by John Gossage — a photographer who has long been an influence on Meeks's own way of seeing — published by Steidl. Gossage pulled individual pictures out of Meeks's archive, free of the sequence and narrative continuity that usually holds a Meeks book together, and gave each one its own page to stand on alone.

Gossage started from a specific realization: that Meeks had "made some of the most stylistically various single pictures that I had ever seen in a serious photographer's work" — a range that his own books, tightly sequenced and world-building, had been quietly folding into coherence all along. Pull one picture free of that world and look at it by itself, and the range shows. One frame reads like a diagram of loss:

"Here is a box squared with knowing. About distance. About weight. The past, set against itself. Edges torn like the hem of a worn coat... The box feels heavy — not from what's inside, but from everything that's been taken out. From the memory of containment. The echo of holding."

A camera obscura. A sentry post. A confession booth. What Gossage assembled is, in his own words, a 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" — variation held together, still, by the feel of a single author.