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Slab City, a former WWII military base, dismantled in 1956 and then occupied by soldiers who installed there following its closure, is a significant location of a certain America. Laura Henno has been there several times making numerous photographs and a film, both of great timeless sensitivity. Her project, which crosses sociology, is not limited to this field, explored by her American elder Dorothea Lange in the interwar period, nor to that of an anthropological observation on the marginalized people.

It is articulated and centered around a more intimate and poetic vision which recounts acts and gestures of a family: Mary Ann, Ethan and Jack Jack who become heroes of her saga, alongside the other residents, Pastor Dave, Benjamin, Julie, Michael, Connie and the dogs, Chronos and Zéro; characters immediately triggerring our sympathy. Individual portraits made with a view camera, constituting at the same time a general portrait of this community in this demarcated territory, by mobile homes, some solitary trees, flanked by unusual objects and burnt horizon in the distant mountain ranges, a global and indivisible vision concealing a rare photographic power, and a feeling of a bizarrely reassuring familiarity for those who see these magnificent images in their touching simplicity, free from any sentimentality or miserable pathos.