Halfstory Halflife documents, like a journal, the happenings of a place where local youth gather to challenge gravity and the expectations of life. Over the course of multiple summers, Raymond Meeks 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. 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. Published by Chose Commune in 2018, the first edition comprises 144 pages with 78 black-and-white photographs. The volume is a section-sewn OTA-bound softcover with flaps, measuring 21.5 by 28 centimeters, designed by Bureau Kayser. The publication includes English and French text and carries the ISBN 979-10-96383-08-5.
Raymond Meeks, born in 1963 in Ohio, lives and works in the Hudson Valley, New York. His pictures have been exhibited at galleries including Fotomuseum Den Haag, Candace Dwan in New York, and Camera Obscura in Paris, and his work is housed in public and private collections including the Bibliothèque Nationale, 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 collaborative journal Township, with Tim Carpenter, Adrianna Ault, and Brad Zellar, was nominated for the 2018 International Photobook Award at Kassel. He is represented by Wouter van Leeuwen in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Halfstory Halflife was shortlisted for Photobook of the Year at the 2018 Aperture Paris Photo Book Awards. For readers of contemporary photobooks, the volume is notable for how its journal-like sequence gathers the repetitions of the falls, the ledge, and the leap into a sustained portrait of youth at the edge of adulthood.
