Nick Meyer grew up in a small mill town in western Massachusetts. Ever since his youth the town’s terrain has been in flux, with houses and shops continuously erected, razed, and rebuilt in the chasm left by disintegrated industries. The Local by Nick Meyer is available through MACK

The Local documents the town of Greenfield – caught between aspiration and decline. It is a deeply personal account which reveals the struggles, tumult and everyday life that occur in a place which, from the outside, appears caught in stasis

Greenfield is the largest town in Franklin County, the least populated county in Massachusetts. It is situated at the crossroads of two major highways: one, north/south, carrying travellers to and from the larger southern cities; the other, east/west, providing a direct route to Boston

People still pass through here on their way to and from the larger north-eastern cities

Meyer’s work was perhaps intended to ‘keep this place from sinking into record as another industrial town devoured by a culture that no longer needs it’

The experience depicted here is of strangeness and familiarity

Meyer’s work offers a uniquely positioned assessment of ‘left behind’ USA, tracing its connections to the particular people and topography of an individual town

The rhythm of change might be recognisable but the parameters have shifted, with opioid addiction and economic crises joining the steady thrum of deindustrialisation in defining the deep-seated volatility

In this way, the studied depiction of stark socio-economic realities effloresces into something more mythic but no less piercing

Meyer’s home town becomes a many-layered, poetic, and often ghostly space, recalling TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson

Meyer says: ‘Using The Waste Land and Paterson as loose and contrasting guides, I am exploring the rough topography of my home town: Franklin County, Massachusetts. The resulting photographs are as much a paean to a known but unrecognisable place as they are an account of disintegrating histories and small-town troubles’

As it moves between past and future, face and landscape, textural detail and vast tableau, Meyer’s shifting perspectives demand a reconsideration of what ‘local’ is: what makes a place a place within the homogenised landscape of postindustrial capital, and what attitude or degree of proximity might disclose it?

Meyer: ‘The Local is both me, the narrator, and the setting as I make my way through the landscape I was raised in. I am trying to glean an awareness or an understanding or simply knowledge of the parts of my home that I have been ignoring’

‘As The Local I am critical of the deterioration, disregard and stasis of rural America, but still very much in love with the idiosyncrasies and hidden back alleys of this place that is both familiar and strange’

Franklin County is the least populated county in mainland Massachusetts. The history of the area dates back to before the first American settlers, into the revolutionary and civil wars, through the industrial revolution and now into the 21st-century drug crisis

Tool factories and paper mills supported the small towns surrounded by farms and pastures until the middle of the 20th century when the industry moved overseas, leaving these towns with a crumbling infrastructure, without a defined economic vehicle, and searching for a new identity

Meyer says: ‘I have watched the landscape shift, caught up in its own history and touched by the world passing through. I have seen houses and shops built, abandoned, torn down and rebuilt, but mostly things have stayed the same’

Meyer: ‘The typewriter store on Bank Row has been there my whole life, as well as the stationer on Main Street. Houses fill and empty at a generational pace, leaving the layers of history on their painted and repainted Victorian clapboards. My entire life I have moved through Franklin County with an entitled sense of belonging and a false sense of understanding. This is the only place that has ever felt like home. In making The Local I am trying to get to know where I am from’

‘As a kid I only thought about leaving, wanting to be somewhere else, to become something else. We spent afternoons escaping behind the grocery store or going down to the train tracks to smoke cigarettes away from the disapproving attentions of teachers. I buy groceries for my family at that same store these days. Now that it is home again, I can see that it has always shown its bruises, whether that is the evident inequality, a lack of identity, a crumbling infrastructure, or a young woman panhandling for change. It is a town in stasis, but I am part of it and it is a part of me’