Empty roads stretching toward the horizon, aging motels, forgotten gas stations, old cars, and vast desert landscapes can feel strangely familiar, even to people who have never visited them. Decades of movies, photographs, and popular culture have turned the American West into both a real place and an imagined one. French photographer Hélène Havard explores that tension in two recent series, “End of the Road” and “Bitter Orange.” Rather than simply documenting abandoned or fading places, Havard is interested in what happens when the West we have absorbed through cinema and collective memory meets the landscape that actually exists. Bored Panda readers may already recognize Havard’s distinctive approach from our previous features on her dreamy photographs of Los Angeles streets and Santa Monica Pier.
In “End of the Road,” muted colors, simple compositions, and traces of human presence emphasize the distance between those two versions of the same territory. “Bitter Orange” approaches similar landscapes through a more deliberately nostalgic visual language. Havard immersed herself in the imagery of the Wild West, finding a particular kind of silence in its deserts and remnants of another era. By giving the photographs an aged, dusty appearance, she intentionally makes their time period harder to place, allowing old cars, roadside buildings, and seemingly deserted spaces to hover somewhere between the past and present. That sense of uncertainty runs throughout Havard’s wider work. A graduate of EFET in Paris who has lived in France, England, and Canada before settling in French Polynesia, she frequently photographs the relationship between people and the places they inhabit, pass through, or imagine.
Scroll down to explore a selection from these two series, and let us know which photographs made you feel as though you had stepped into another time.
