Raymond Meeks: 'The Inhabitants' at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Fondation d’entreprise Hermès is a long-standing supporter of the visual arts, notably through Immersion, a French-American Photographic Commission. Launched in 2014, the programme pursues a vocation to support new, contemporary photography in France and the United States.

In partnership with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris and the International Center of Photography in New York, the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès has devised an exchange scheme for residencies between France and the US, to promote the making of new photographic series leading to exhibitions at both institutions, and dedicated monograph publications.

The alternating, annual residencies invite French photographers to work in situ in the US, and American photographers to work in France. Laureates are selected by an international jury of experts, to receive a bursary and mentoring from a leading personality in the world of photography.

Immersion’s sixth laureate, American photographer Raymond Meeks, was mentored throughout his residency in France by David Campany, Curator at Large for the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, as patron of the 2022 edition.

Raymond Meeks spent several weeks in the Calais region (north-west France) and the Basque Country (straddling the western end of the Pyrenees), following in the footsteps of refugees seeking to break through the frontiers imposed by fellow human beings. In both black-and-white and colour, the resulting series — titled The Inhabitants — transports the viewer’s gaze to these liminal spaces, sometimes harmless-seeming, sometimes monumental, potentially hostile, with images that range from vast horizons to scenes glimpsed through tall wire fences.

Raymond Meeks’s photographs feature in an exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier- Bresson, Paris, from October 9 to January 5, 2025, and an accompanying monograph, The Inhabitants, co-published by Mack Books and the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. The series continues Meeks’s artistic exploration of the ways in which human beings inhabit the world around them, and his own connections to others.

[Raymond Meeks] chooses not to photograph the faces of those who have left their homes in search of a better future, but rather the places through which they journey, and the traces of their passing. A shoe in the mud, a rolled-up blanket on the ground, a jacket hanging from the branches of a tree. Meeks is especially interested in the inhospitable places that migrants inhabit fleetingly along the way: ditches, embankments, the interstices of the motorway network, riverbanks, waste-ground and other non-spaces. Rivers — clearly visible or otherwise — are a constant presence in these pictures. A metaphor, perhaps, for the migration flows they record.

Barriers abound — slopes of scree, concrete blocks, tangled brambles and barbed wire — but they pale into insignificance beside the obstacles the refugees must overcome, day after day. Auguste Rodin’s statuary group, The Burghers of Calais, features too — a testimony to the murderous history of the Hundred Years' War. The accompanying prose text, by American writer and poet George Weld resonates closely with Meeks’s restrained, empathetic approach.
Clément Chéroux, exhibition curator.