My America

The origins of agricultural land consolidation in northern France date back to the 1950s. 

This practice involved consolidating scattered agricultural plots into larger farms, thereby facilitating the use of farm machinery and the adoption of more efficient farming methods. This land consolidation helped optimize yields and improve farmers’ living conditions during the postwar period, when the goal was to feed the country. However, land consolidation also had social and environmental consequences, including the disappearance of small farms and the loss of biodiversity. Today, it remains a controversial legacy in the agricultural landscape of northern France. The agricultural economic model resulting from postwar policy decisions is now at odds with environmental realities that call for agriculture that is more respectful of nature.

This intensive, conventional form of agriculture is also the one I grew up with and that is part of my heritage. I lived in a hamlet of four houses in this region of the Great Plains, south of Arras. During my childhood, I spent my summers on my uncles’ farms in that same region. At the time, my father worked in the agribusiness industry and was transferred to the plains of the American Midwest. Thanks to his stories about that trip, I fantasized about this America of wide-open spaces for many years. This America, which I didn’t know at the time, was one of endless possibilities.

When I returned there a few decades later, I wanted to understand this landscape and the people who work there, and perhaps also reconnect with that sense of nostalgia by drawing a connection to my photographic culture, which has been heavily influenced by American photography.

I began this project in 2020 by focusing on the Great Plains region between Arras and Bapaume, because of the uniformity of its landscape and culture, and also because it is where I grew up. I decided to take a deliberate, unhurried approach to observing this rural landscape in order to find visual connections between this America and this region. I therefore used a view camera as my medium.

This project is part of my personal body of work, which I began about ten years ago. Like my previous works, it aims to explore the connections between landscape and human activity within a given territory and over time.