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Ballads of Dust and Silence: Heroes and Legends Who Defined the American West
I was born and raised in Normandy, far from deserts or open rangeland, yet the American West entered my life early through television—through Rin Tin Tin, the male German Shepherd born in Flirey, France, who became an international film star after being rescued from World War I; through Wanted Dead or Alive, where Steve McQueen’s bounty hunter Josh Randall carried the distinctive shortened rifle known as the Mare’s Leg, a modified Winchester Model 1892; and through the American boys at my school, whose families remained stationed in France after World War II.
Later came late-night Westerns and weathered paperbacks. Long before I ever crossed an ocean, I carried its light and dust within my imagination. The cowboys, Native Americans, and the Wild West became less historical figures and more a posture of being—patient, solitary, and life-oriented.
Years later, when I settled in New Mexico, the landscapes felt strangely familiar, as though memory had preceded experience. I understood then that I was not discovering a place but encountering an image I had long carried.
This series of photographs is an homage—to the United States, the country I now call my own; to my American wife, Claudia, and the legacy of the West she carries; and to that vast, quiet frontier—once boundless in imagination before it revealed itself in the world.
Paperback — 140 pages
Black-and-white photography, printed in color
8.5 × 8.5 in. (21.6 × 21.6 cm), square format
Perfect bound
ISBN 978-1-937487-91-1
Ballads of Dust and Silence: Heroes and Legends Who Defined the American West
I was born and raised in Normandy, far from deserts or open rangeland, yet the American West entered my life early through television—through Rin Tin Tin, the male German Shepherd born in Flirey, France, who became an international film star after being rescued from World War I; through Wanted Dead or Alive, where Steve McQueen’s bounty hunter Josh Randall carried the distinctive shortened rifle known as the Mare’s Leg, a modified Winchester Model 1892; and through the American boys at my school, whose families remained stationed in France after World War II.
Later came late-night Westerns and weathered paperbacks. Long before I ever crossed an ocean, I carried its light and dust within my imagination. The cowboys, Native Americans, and the Wild West became less historical figures and more a posture of being—patient, solitary, and life-oriented.
Years later, when I settled in New Mexico, the landscapes felt strangely familiar, as though memory had preceded experience. I understood then that I was not discovering a place but encountering an image I had long carried.
This series of photographs is an homage—to the United States, the country I now call my own; to my American wife, Claudia, and the legacy of the West she carries; and to that vast, quiet frontier—once boundless in imagination before it revealed itself in the world.
Paperback — 140 pages
Black-and-white photography, printed in color
8.5 × 8.5 in. (21.6 × 21.6 cm), square format
Perfect bound
ISBN 978-1-937487-91-1