Raymond Meeks made the photographs in The Inhabitants while living in northern France during the summer of 2022, having been named the sixth Immersion laureate. That commission, a French–American photographic initiative established by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, supports work made in a specific region and gives it an institutional life: the photographs were exhibited in New York and Paris, and the book was co-published with the foundation. MACK issued the English edition in 2023.

The book is an artist’s book rather than an exhibition catalogue. It combines Meeks’s photographs with an extended poem by George Weld, allowing two voices to share the same pages without one merely illustrating the other. Across 172 pages, the relationship between image and text is the central fact of the publication: the poem runs alongside the photographs, and the sequence asks to be read rather than skimmed.

Physically, it is a debossed hardcover with slipcase, 21.5 x 30 cm, published in September 2023. The format matters for a project of this kind. Scale and pacing shape how the photographs are encountered, and the slipcase signals that the book is meant to be kept and revisited as a complete object.

For collectors, the significance is documented and specific. The Inhabitants belongs to the sixth cycle of the Immersion commission, a program with a French–American framework and the backing of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. Its publication coincides with exhibitions in New York and Paris, yet the book is not secondary to them: it is the form in which Meeks’s photographs and Weld’s poem meet. That combination—commissioned body of work, institutional context, and a genuine photographic–poetic collaboration—is the reason to pay attention.