If you can think back to your earliest experiences in a school P.E. class, think back to the time you first learned to roll a somersault. You were taught to crouch down, form your body into a ball, and then try to roll in a forward direction. I have no doubt this is good for physiological development, clearly helping to develop cognitive muscle control. I also now like to think of this act as a yogic metaphor implanted in our early childhood psyches; as if by rolling our bodies like the gears inside a clock we are taught to embody the cycles of time.
Somersault is also the newest book by photographer Raymond Meeks. It’s a meditation on the passage of time, particularly time understood as a relationship between parent and child. Billed as a collaborative project with Adam Meeks (his son?) and about his daughter Abbey, Somersault is best understood as an internal investigation by the photographer, about a sense of self he can only know because of his children. The book is a lovely, poetic study of time, and is full of love, longing, melancholy, and affection.
The first two pictures — on the cover and then the opening page — reveal a great deal about the narrative of the book. The cover photograph shows Meeks’ daughter Abbey standing in an overgrown field next to a blooming rose bush. The field itself looks unkempt — she is standing among overgrown grasses with a fallen fence behind her — but the rose conjures a sense of beauty and hope. There is also something about her pose that references classics of art history, a posture as effortless as it evocative (I think of Botticelli’s Venus). The picture embodies a lovely metaphor, evoking beauty and love amidst such a dissonant and chaotic world. Opening the cover, the first picture is an apple tree in the fall, leaves already down but some of the fruit still clinging to the branches. Again, this picture offers lovely metaphors, here about family, belonging, and the passage of time. Behind the tree, in soft-focus along the horizon, is a trestle, somehow suggesting the identities we assume over a lifetime, a bridge that connects the pieces of ourselves, the crux of the narrative Meeks suggests in documenting Abbey’s transition from childhood into life as a fully independent and mature woman.
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The pages that follow weave together photographs of landscapes and portraits of Abbey. The landscapes often appear broken or neglected — a sort of terrain vague that so frequently attracts photographers — but also strangely effervescent, full of warmth and love. Repeatedly, the landscapes are made around the railroad lines and trestles that I imagine to be near their family home. For me this helps to confirm the narrative or metaphor I envisioned with the opening photographs, emphasizing a life always moving forward into the distance, like the tracks themselves.
The book concludes with several short passages of writing by Abbey, reflecting on her own relationship to the photographs and her emergent sense of self. These certainly help with the intimacy of the book, and she presents an ingratiating degree of self-awareness. I can’t shake the feeling, however, that her words were coached and edited to fit the narrative Meeks intended. Perhaps they feel just a little too perfect. With such a mature and solid approach to making pictures, I can’t help but think something a bit less polished would add a surprising element to the book. Interspersed with Abbey’s words are three photographs of concrete walls, boulders, and trees, all made beneath the train tracks. The pictures embody a sense of loss — clearly Meeks reflecting on his daughter moving on from the family home — with the last picture being a circle of sunlight illuminating one of the walls, shadows of a tree cast across its center. It appears almost like the face of a clock, concluding this rumination on life and time only a growing child can reveal.
It is difficult not to compare Somersault with Meeks’ previous book, ciprian honey cathedral, a book about his partner, Adrianna Ault. The strategies of the two books are the same, juxtaposing portraits with landscapes (clearly the same place). In the most basic sense, the narratives of the books are the same, too, both addressing the redemptive quality of love while living in such a confusing and discordant world. As a much smaller and more humble production, Somersault offers a greater feeling of intimacy, and falls less into the trope of the male artist and his epic love (please don’t misunderstand me, ciprian honey cathedral is an amazing book, but there is undeniably an exhaustive canon of photographers looking at their wives and lovers).
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In looking over Meeks’ career, it is easy to understand why so many regard him as one of the primary photobook makers of the day — Halfstory Halife, Crime Victim Chronicle (a collaboration with Deborah Luster), and Idyll: Orchard Volume 3 (a collaboration with Mark Steinmetz) are as masterful as they are inventive. Somersault is less inventive in form and is much more sentimental, but nevertheless the work of a compelling and masterful photographer. As is always the case with MACK, the book is a delightful object made with a remarkable sensitivity to craft and an understanding of the book as a unique art form. The latter is no small achievement given the high print runs the publisher is capable of fulfilling. I encourage those interested in Meeks but unfamiliar with his work to act quickly on this book, because if you look for some of his earlier works you will find them prohibitively expensive and hard to find. Those with any sustained interest in the photographer’s work won’t be disappointed either.
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