Nick Meyer grew up in a mill town in western Massachusetts, and the place he photographs in The Local is one he has watched be demolished and rebuilt around himself. Houses and shops appear, vanish, and reappear in the gap left by industries that no longer run there. Published by MACK in 2021, the book treats that churn as its subject rather than its backdrop: a community suspended between wanting more and losing ground.

Meyer’s method is a matter of stance rather than argument. He moves between close description and wide view, between faces and terrain, between what a street looks like now and what it is becoming. Opioid addiction and recurring economic crisis belong to the town’s weather, folded into the slower fact of deindustrialisation. The perspective is personal without turning confessional; scenes that ought to feel familiar arrive at altered proportions.

The “left behind” American town is by now a familiar figure in photography, and often a flattening one. What sets this work apart is its refusal of the type. By holding to a single town — its particular streets, its particular people — Meyer makes the general case harder to assemble and more worth assembling. The book borders on the mythic while staying exact in its attention, and it keeps returning to a question the title only seems to answer: what makes a place a place, and how close must one stand to see it?

The Local runs 112 pages at 24 × 28 cm in printed paper hardback, and its design follows the logic of its pictures, with detail giving way to panorama and one frame answering another. For collectors drawn to contemporary documentary that works at the scale of a single place rather than a thesis, this third MACK book of Meyer’s is a considered example: modest in format, deliberate in sequence, and clear-eyed about the distance between a photographer and the ground he stands on.