Page after page, like a Faulknerian journey, the American landscape unfolds in all its immense expanse and in large format. Much more than a literary allusion or a road movie, the pictures Jérôme Brézillon brought back from various journeys to the United States between 1999 and 2003 assert themselves within a tradition — that of the colourists, with the impeccable technique of the New Topographics — while claiming a modern attachment to landscape.

These fifty landscapes without quality are met by chance by the traveller and revealed in the austerity of the document: frontality, colour, sharpness. There is no need for a human presence, or for a junk Stetson, to mean that no space is blank or free. If the grotesque sometimes gives way to irony, the conquest has long been over. From the Deep South to North Dakota, the arc is wide.