Across the lightly travelled highways, isolated motels, and deserted towns of southern Texas, Kourtney Roy places a conspicuous figure: herself. In Sorry, No Vacancy, the photographer assumes the role of a traveller moving through settings that seem suspended between present-day reality and the afterimage of an earlier era. These expansive surroundings are not treated as neutral scenery. Roy’s staged presence activates them, turning roadside spaces into compact, enigmatic scenes.

The book centres on self-portraiture as performance. Roy constructs a character through incongruous associations, strange scenarios, and a humour that can tip into the absurd. Rather than simply documenting the region, she uses its near-empty roads and settlements as a theatrical framework in which identity is repeatedly posed and unsettled. The resulting tension is distinctive: the landscape suggests abandonment and historical distance, while the figure remains vivid, deliberate, and knowingly artificial.

That contrast gives the work significance beyond its immediate geography. Sorry, No Vacancy considers how a photographer may inhabit familiar images of travel and remoteness without accepting their conventions at face value. Roy is at once author, subject, and disruptive element. Her self-image interrupts the apparent stillness of southern Texas, bringing play, unease, and narrative ambiguity into places described as ghostlike remnants of the past.

Published by PIONNIERE in 2017, this French-language paperback presents the project in a concise 24-page format measuring approximately 15.5 × 24 cm. It was issued as a numbered first edition limited to 401 copies. For collectors concerned with staged photography and the photobook as a concentrated artistic statement, its interest lies in the close alignment of subject and method: a bounded publication in which performance, landscape, and photographic authorship are inseparable.