Eloïse Labarbe Lafon, American album, 2025

American Album is a book of images captured on the road, retracing a love story across the United States, in an era when the American dream seems to be crumbling. A journey where the protagonists chase after something elusive while fleeing an undefined reality.

In this flight, landscapes unfold, similar yet shifting, like cardboard sets endlessly reinventing themselves. Hotel rooms, diners with empty plates, colorful houses, desert landscapes—a frenetic accumulation of frozen moments, like a compulsive cataloging born of a desire to immobilize the ephemeral, an irrepressible need to grasp everything, to classify everything. But beyond the fantasy, everything is changing. The sets fade, reverse, the quest seems to end only to escape again, in a grand whirlwind, a gentle storm where landmarks dissolve. In a dazzling, artificial America, the lovers leap from one film to another, never finding their way out.

The oil paint applied to the black and white photographs accentuates this oscillation between reality and illusion. Sometimes faithful, sometimes dissonant, it reinterprets the world, giving each image a new dimension. Between gentleness and tension, between quest and desire, American Album captures this suspended moment, just before everything changes.