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From July 1st to September 23rd, 2019 in Arles, Artsphalte welcomes the world of Ronan Guillou with the photographic exhibition ”Old Glory”.

In the beginning it was nature, at a hostile and inhospitable pace. When man came to confront her with the will to adapt to his constraints to make the most of it, he had to invent a territory and believe in an ideal, that of a country where everything is ”possible”.

Through the fragments of America proposed by Ronan Guillou, the exhibition ”Old Glory” takes us to the borders of a country divided between the tenacious belief in an old American dream and the end of an Eden that probably never existed.

”Old Glory”, nickname of the American flag to the time-honoured patriotic fervor, evokes this paradise both lost and found, where ancient myths, real or fantasized, continue to act in confrontation with existing realities.

At the crossroads of documentary, personal narrative and formal study, Ronan Guillou highlights a timeless and contrasted America which he says ”carries with it the paradoxes and excesses of humanity”. The photographer takes a tender and sensitive look at the melancholy of ”forgotten children of the American dream”, these ”survivors” retained in intermediate spaces, stuck-up between two Americas, the one of the past and the one of the present, the America of the promises and the one of disillusionment.

Laurène Gattet