Published by Louis Vuitton Malletier in 2016, Kourtney Roy’s California approaches the state through colorful self-portraits rather than a conventional geographic survey. Roy does not simply record familiar Californian surfaces: she places herself within them, assuming the role of protagonist as well as photographer. Drawing on old-fashioned American visual codes, the pictures construct an offbeat California—recognizable through cultural shorthand, yet made strange by pose, costume and controlled artifice.

Roy’s position on both sides of the camera is central to the book. Each setting becomes a stage on which place and persona are negotiated together. California consequently appears not as a comprehensive account of a territory, but as an imagined environment shaped by performance. The method complicates the expectations of travel photography: observation gives way to enactment, while the photographer’s presence makes authorship an explicit part of the subject.

The 96-page hardcover was issued in the Fashion Eye series in a large quarto format, with color photographs presented alongside French and English text. An interview with Roy at the end of the volume provides a verbal counterpart to the photographs. These elements give the publication a defined editorial structure, placing the work between artist’s book, fashion image and photographic study of place without reducing it to any one of those categories.

For a photobook collection, California is significant as a concentrated example of Roy’s self-portrait practice and of a travel book built through fiction rather than description alone. Its interest lies in the sustained tension between landscape and staged identity: California supplies the imagery and mythology, while Roy remains the recurring figure through whom both are examined. Collectors attentive to constructed photography, photographic performance and the changing conventions of the travel volume will find here a focused publication in which subject, method and book form are closely aligned.