Oscillating between the elaboration of a biographical narrative and the production of a social portrait, Nick Meyer’s work portrays the depression that grips a small mill town in western Massachusetts, the town where the author grew up, witnessing the various economic upheavals that the same town has undergone between enthusiasm, growth,  regrowth, reconstruction and the depression due to the process of de-industrialisation that has characterised most of the last decades of the history of industry in the United States.

Inserting himself in a consolidated tradition of authors who have recounted the American territory and the great economic depressions that have disrupted its landscape and humanity, Nick Meyer’s work employs a gaze that departs from works such as those of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Carl Mydans for an ability to renew the same gaze and realise his images in a way that brings his work closer to a cinematographic, rhythmic vision.

This author’s images seem to be taken in the course of a passage, a close but at the same time light crossing, which sees and narrates the community that lines the streets of the place, producing a dramatic and honest overall portrait.

In The Local the images fow one after the other to compose, impression after impression, the instances of a story whose rhythm brings us closer to life and whose tones, although diferent, recall those that we can fnd in the more radical flms of a director such as Ken Loach, an author to whom Nick Meyer’s work can also be compared by virtue of the social commitment that characterises both projects, even though they are set in two diferent geographical and temporal areas.