Nick Meyer on making a challenge close to residence
"When Trump was elected in 2016, I was pretty nervous and felt that I had ignored the world," recalls Nick Meyer. The photographer had been living in Greenfield, Massachusetts – the former mill town where he grew up – for around ten years. At that time he knew people who traveled to the Mexican border to document the crisis. Instead, with two young children at home, he set out to explore his surroundings.
“I started thinking more about what was right around me and where I am here in western Massachusetts. It's an interesting area because there are many universities and a lot of wealth in the area, but there is also a lot of poverty, ”he tells us. The photos he takes become The Local, his new photo book by Mack that explores the social background and topography of the region from a place of familiarity and discovery.
Like many cities and towns in New England, Greenfield remains overshadowed by an industrial and agricultural past. The main industry in the city was the making of tools and parts, which housed workshops and tapping factories that made screws, nuts, and bolts. Industry in the region disappeared around the 1950s and with it the economic elixir of life.
Much of it had happened before Meyer's life. When he was young, the big factory had become an abandoned building where teenagers went to drink. "It's never been a booming city, but it's a very American thing, where these little towns had their industries that kept them going," he estimates that there's only one big factory left nearby. “The industry was never here in my lifetime. In the 80s everything was gone. "
All images by Nick Meyer from The Local, published by Mack, 2021, courtesy of the artist and Mack
The book's title is inspired by William Carlos Williams' epic five-part poem Paterson, in which “Paterson is treated as both Paterson, New Jersey, the city he came from, and Paterson in the poem. I really liked the idea that you come from both a place and a place. "
A less pioneering, but more recent cultural reference that has parallels to the project is a particularly poignant episode in the late Anthony Bourdain's travel food series Parts Unknown. In it, Bourdain visits both Provincetown and Greenfield, Massachusetts, to uncover the realities of an opioid-stricken area against the backdrop of his own past addictions.