Photographer: Charlotte Bresson

Expatriated with her family to Los Angeles for professional reasons, Charlotte Bresson first tasted the illusion of an American dream: a luxurious house, a glittering swimming pool, a Mexican gardener watching over the green paradise. But the midlife crisis arises, like a storm. Suddenly, no longer loving each other. Accusing one's wife, dreaming of freedom with a capital letter, abhorring one's life, wishing to erase the past. Send everything flying. His days are filled with lonely people in front of the pool, a glass of white wine in hand. His only link with the outside world becomes the pool guy. In the evening, when the children are in bed and the husband is far away, she repeats to herself tirelessly: "It's not possible". One day, driven by a survival instinct, she takes her car. It avoids motorways, preferring dirt roads ending in dead ends. In the middle of the night, she doesn't see anyone. At nine o'clock in the evening, the curtain falls. It's all over. All that remains are the solitary neon lights of the dinners: OPEN, but deserted. Cowboys, Indians. Empty looks, barely sketched stories. She crosses paths with them. Photographs. Is only passing through. Leaves. They stay there. Immutable in his shots. Embodied in our shots, having inspired those who passed through over the years. Entire lives unfolding within a few miles. Somewhere in Utah, New Mexico or Arizona. At the entrance to a no-man's land. These little wanderings in the American immensity. These solitudes. These motionless traces. Ours. And suddenly, the revelation that elsewhere awaits him. That this elsewhere carries a promise, a tenuous one certainly, but a promise all the same, the one that revives the sensation of living: that of all possibilities. Charlotte Bresson, who was destined to become a private detective, gave up tailing, but retained an insatiable curiosity for the world, leaving an element of mystery and suggestiveness to the things around her. The photographed spaces and objects then become immobile moments telling the story of Man in the background. A freelance photographer, Charlotte co-founded the Images Sensibles collective. With this collective, she exhibited in London and Paris, winning the Discovery Prize awarded by Peter Knapp at the Pierrevert festival in 2014.