Selected as Best Book of the Year by Clément Chéroux, Chief Curator of Photography at MoMA, BuzzFeed
What is there between the branch and apple when it falls?
We have seen it—we would recognize it anywhere. Yet of an evening we are told nothing is there.
- Wright Morris
Raymond Meeks is renowned for his use of photography and the book form to poetically distill the liminal junctures of vision, consciousness and comprehension. In ciprian honey cathedral, he brings this scrutiny close to home, delicately probing at the legibility of our material surroundings and the people closest to us.
Meeks has long been fascinated by the way we construct the world around us; how we carry our possessions, these accumulated comforts, inheritances, markers of material success; how we adorn homes with trees and shrubs, a mantle clock to count the hours. Stumbling across an abandoned house or unkempt lawn becomes a search for common clues to tiny hidden transgressions.
This question of knowledge and understanding is perhaps most drastic in our solipsistic reality. Meeks also photographed his partner, Adrianna Ault, in the early mornings before she awoke, on the threshold at which daily domestic life converges with the deepest state of sleep. This plight of supine trance is a place of reprieve beneath the surface of consciousness, free from the chaos and uncertainty of the sentient world above, and alludes to the veiled threat that, ultimately, we are utterly unknowable to one another.
“A photographic hymn to the home…and the experience and narrative it gives to our lives“ – New Statesman, Books of the Year
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Hardcover with printed PVC jacket
96 pages
30 x 24cm
September 2020