Alain Balmayer - America secondhand

The United States of America is - in addition to everything else - also the realm of photography. As early as 1888, Georges Eastman launched a camera capable of taking 100 photographs. From then on, photography began its massive career as a national hobby, and on that basis Kodak built its empire.

To be fair, it must be added that, at the same time, Americans were the perpetrators of the creation of the world's strongest market for the sale of photography understood as art, and the artists there were and are the perpetrators of landmarks in its development. In the plethora of photographs taken in the US, it is extremely rare to come across photographs taken by visitors, and if you do, they are simply photographs of major cities, not to say New York. So either America is unphotogenic, inaccessible, or the newcomers who sometimes play there do not have enough imagination to create their own vision of this civilization giant. One of the more beautiful exceptions to this rule is the far too little-known French photographer Alain Balmayer.

Balmayer was born in 1930, and took up photography as a passionate and self-taught photographer in the 1950s, and in a short time brought his craft to unsurpassed mastery. He exhibits by choice relatively rarely, but each presentation of the copies he makes is a true feast for the eyes.

It is not difficult to see that from the technical side he must have been inspired by the American school under the sign of Adams and Weston, but the analogies end there, except for the fact that from 1984 the artist began to travel regularly in the States, as if he wanted to confront his great masters on their own soil. After serving as director of the ICART PHOTO school near Paris, he has already made about fifty of these trips. The fruits of this gigantic work have been published in the book Alain Balmayer topographies. The publication is editorially sensational, and the vision of the United States is consistent and surprising, going as far as surrealism.

In Balmayer's frames, the country turns into a deserted planet that has escaped the passage of time and the associated dying of things. Here is a stretch of desert, with rocks on the horizon, and in the foreground an asphalted treadmill with indistinct stripes without a trace of use, but also dust and dust lingering all around.

Many questions come to mind: who can run in this Martian landscape? Who's going to watch it if there aren't even grandstands and a living ghost around? Or is it the whim of some eccentric billionaire? Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey, and even New York, and everywhere the same desert, the end of the asphalt and surreal structures and objects of often-unknown origin and purpose. It sometimes resembles some kind of secret testing grounds, and only a plane flying very low informs one that there is life going on somewhere.

And if they hit the ruins in all of this, it's somehow strange there, clean and quite tidy. Perhaps this is a sign that money rules and in the wilderness.