Sylvie Meunier & Patrick Tourneboeuf

American Dream
Amateur snapshots assembled by Sylvie Meunier and Patrick Tournebœuf



This wonderful collection of amateur snapshots assembled by Sylvie Meunier and Patrick Tournebœuf delightfully revisits one of the iconic motifs of the American Dream: the automobile, that pure object of desire. What would remain of our imaginary America without its road trips, without those Pontiacs or Studebakers to eat up the miles? The 1950s and 1960s saw the American middle class enjoy new domestic comforts, new modular houses, and above all, the automobile, that symbol of success and promise of freedom. Everyone in this joyous family album wants to be seen with their vehicle, their pose displaying a sense of stunned appropriation and glowing pride.

Sylvie Meunier has been collecting anonymous photographs for many years. These amateur images constitute the privileged material of her work. She uses their banality and their decontextualized nature as a space that is almost devoid of narrative, creating assemblages and installations in which the “story” then depends on the possibility of projection, reflection and reconstruction, on the way emotion engages with her propositions.

Patrick Tournebœuf is a photography buff, both a passionate photographer and a collector of other people’s images. Taking a highly visual, systematic approach, he uses his camera to seek traces of human presence in places that seem bereft of it, probing history and meticulously examining the banality of appearances. He follows the same principles in collecting photographs by others.

American Dream
Editions Textuel
Release : 29 March 2017
Patrick Tournebœuf & Sylvie Meunier
16,5 x 23,5 cm
176 pages – 112 photographies
Harcover – 32 €
Press release

☛ Launch party at Artazart bookstore – 28 March 2017, 7 pm – 9:30 pm
83 quai de Valmy, 75010 Paris
+ d’infos

☛ Exhibition at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris)
20 April – 24 September 2017
An installation of 196 original prints will be presented as part as «Autophoto», a collective exhibition that shows how the car provided photographers with a new subject, new point of view and new way of exploring the world.
More info