Ambroise Tézenas

A playful road trip, France

One evening as I was coming back to my hotel in the suburbs of Strasbourg, I came across a police car marked “NYPD” offered for rent. This vision immediately evoked an elsewhere, it was not America, just a mirage, but not quite France.
I often question myself on this elsewhere, inseparable from my photographer’s life.
Is it necessarily far away? You can be at the end of the world and yet not have travelled.
As a European, I have built a specific mental image of America, a mix of culture, myths and landscapes with an ambivalent feeling: on the one hand lucid and critical; on the other admiring and almost dependent. Our society is borrowing so much to the American model both culturally and in our daily life and our debates reflect the anxieties and controversies going along this hegemonic civilization which imposed itself.
Are we all Americans as the French writer Régis Debray asserts in "Civilization", his latest book?
This photo essay is a short narrative, a play full road trip.