American Album is a book of images captured on the road, retracing a love story across the United States, in a time when the American dream seems to be collapsing. A journey where the protagonists chase after something elusive while fleeing an undefined reality.
On this runaway path, landscapes scroll past—similar yet shifting—like cardboard sets endlessly renewing themselves. Hotel rooms, diners with empty plates, colourful houses, desert vistas: a frenetic accumulation of frozen moments, like the compulsive cataloging of a desire to immobilise the ephemeral, an irrepressible need to grasp and classify everything. But beyond the fantasy, all is changeable. Sets fade and reverse; the quest appears to end, only to slip away again, in a whirlwind, a gentle storm where all bearings dissolve. In a dazzling and artificial America, the lovers leap from one film to another without ever finding the exit.
Oil paint applied to black-and-white photographs heightens this oscillation between reality and illusion. Sometimes faithful, sometimes dissonant, it reinterprets the world, granting each image a new dimension. Between softness and tension, between quest and desire, American Album captures a suspended moment—just before everything tips.
Published by Cé Éditions, 2025, France
American Album will be launched at Claire de Rouen on Thursday 18 September 2025. Books will be shipped thereafter.
