Kourtney Roy’s Last Paradise begins on the Adriatic coast, around Rimini, after the summer crowds have gone. Through this emptied resort landscape, an eccentric woman follows a fictional itinerary shaped by unspecified cataclysmic events. Beaches, leisure architecture and other remnants of seasonal pleasure become the setting for a narrative suspended between aftermath and anticipation.
Roy works at the boundary between dream and constructed reality. Saturated colour and emphatic contrasts preserve the seductive surface of the Italian seaside while making its vacancy increasingly uneasy. The protagonist gives the images a cinematic continuity, yet the project resists resolving itself into a conventional plot. Instead, it asks what human environments might communicate once their inhabitants have disappeared: desire remains encoded in buildings and objects, even as nature and infrastructure appear abandoned to one another.
Photography is only one part of the work. Mathias Delplanque developed an original musical component in parallel, drawing inspiration from his exploration of a museum devoted to vintage synthesizers. A 45 rpm record is inserted into the book, allowing sound and image to operate as related but distinct forms of narration. This structure is especially apt for a project concerned with unstable states—between high season and dormancy, reality and reverie, familiar pleasure grounds and a possible post-catastrophic future.
Published by Filigranes in 2024, the French-English hardcover comprises 96 pages and was issued as 500 numbered copies. Its importance for a photobook collection lies not simply in its atmospheric imagery, but in the coherence of its conception: staged photographic fiction, a precisely chosen geographical setting and an independently composed soundtrack are brought together within a single artist-book format. Last Paradise rewards attention as an integrated work, one in which the physical act of moving between page and record extends the project’s central tension between what can be seen and what can only be imagined.
