Purple America

05.06 – 05.09.2021

Jérôme Taub produced this series of photographs during a visual journey into the heart of contemporary America. Imagined as an anti-roadtrip, crossing the US from one ocean to another taking only the Interstate highways, Jérôme Taub develops a polymorphous vision that references documentary aesthetics, conceptual photography, or avant-garde American cinema, while simultaneously holding them at a distance. It is as if he is reminding us of the inescapable reference system unique to American imagery, to enable us to move beyond it. 

In an act whose singularity comes from the totality of the undertaking – one year of preparation studying literary, musical, cinematographic, sociological, and philosophical sources, then three months of uninterrupted journey – Purple America holds us poised between a punishing performative relationship knotted to the territory, and an almost psychoanalytical examination of the people and the places that they live in. As a dark and uncompromising portrait of a bi-polar America is drawn before our eyes, the desire for a nation illuminated by its founding myths persists. 

Each confrontation, each construction, puts the subject in the centre of a possible representation of what they might be within a community of individuals and a space-time that only the physical and mental journey of the photographer defines. This photography of suspended time that the choices and compositions allow nourishes the possibility of a contemplation, set apart, in which nothing counts more than the question of presence in the world in its totality, freed from photography’s frequent obligation of eventality. 

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Nicolas Lévy.

With the support of: Ateliers d’art SHL, Arles, Cabinet House & Co/ Jonathan Le Corronc Clady, Canon France, Catherine Léonard, CBA Informatiques Libérales, Doux Joaillier, EGPA Provence/Emmanuel de France, Germains & Associés, Granier Assurances, Johan Hugues (Blachères illuminations), Rubis Matériaux, Société Germain & Associés, Société Henry, Sols Azurs, Sud Courtages, Terres de Cuisine.