The Inhabitants [French edition], published by MACK in 2024, brings together photographs by Raymond Meeks and a long poem by George Weld. The book grew from Meeks’s residence in northern France during the summer of 2022, undertaken as the sixth recipient of Immersion, the Franco-American photographic commission created by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. Its subject is therefore not simply a place recorded from the outside, but a body of work shaped by sustained attention to a particular region and by the encounter between an American photographer and the French landscape and its inhabitants.

The pairing of image and poem gives the project a deliberately literary and open-ended structure. Weld’s text is not presented as explanatory commentary; rather, it forms a parallel presence beside Meeks’s photographs, allowing the book to move between observation, memory, and speculation. This collaboration resists the idea of photographic documentation as a complete account. Instead, it proposes a more elastic reading of place, in which the inhabitants of the title may be understood through both what is pictured and what language leaves unresolved.

The book also belongs to a wider exhibition project: the work made during the residence was scheduled to be shown in New York and Paris, with the publication serving as its artist’s-book counterpart. For collectors, its significance lies in this convergence of commissioned photography, literary collaboration, and cross-Atlantic cultural exchange. The French edition is a substantial 172-page hardcover published by MACK, presenting Meeks’s images and Weld’s poem as a designed whole rather than as separate contributions. It merits attention as a carefully constituted record of a specific residency and as an example of contemporary photobook practice that treats sequencing, text, and place as equally active materials.