Published in 2018 as volume nine of Carnets, Petits Paysages Américains is a 48-page, French-language proposition about how the United States has been pictured. It begins from a familiar imbalance: American scenery is routinely rendered as vast, forceful and spectacular, while canonical photographs—Ansel Adams’s above all—have helped establish that grandeur as a shared visual memory. This book answers not by seeking a rival sublime, but by reducing the scale of the claim.
Its “small American landscapes” are modest black-and-white analogue photographs made with a Leica M6 and a single 35mm Summicron lens. The stated discipline is exacting: no retouching and no cropping. Those constraints matter less as technical credentials than as an ethics of looking. A fixed camera-and-lens combination, coupled with the refusal to reshape the frame afterward, keeps the work close to ordinary human sight and resists the inflated, quasi-virtual image of America that the project questions.
The geographical range includes places already burdened with photographic mythology—Monument Valley, Arches, Zion, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Death Valley, the Louisiana bayous and Niagara Falls. Yet these landmarks are placed within the same conception of landscape as uncelebrated sites that remain equally real and, in the book’s argument, equally emblematic of the country. Rather than discovering another untouched icon, the project shifts attention from the exceptional view to the conditions by which any view becomes representative.
For a collector, the book’s interest lies in the precision of that counterproposal. Across a concise 48 pages, it brings subject, process and historical reference into unusually close alignment: celebrated terrain and anonymous ground, photographic memory and direct observation, monumentality and restraint. Its significance does not depend on novelty of location, but on a clearly articulated position within the tradition of American landscape photography and the economical consistency with which that position is pursued.
