Built in two stages and two movements, the work is the fruit of seventeen journeys to the United States between 1996 and 2011. Neither a reporter nor a photojournalist, an heir of street work, Jean-Christophe Béchet holds that the ground of reality and of the subjective documentary taken from life must not be abandoned at a time when everything pushes towards staging, image rights and digital retouching.

He adopts here the point of view of the visitor, of the walker, crossing the spaces and following his route in order to confront it with his own memory and with the knowledge of his great elders and mentors — Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and the great colourists such as Eggleston and Stephen Shore — for whom, too, the territory of the book is a privileged space. One cannot record the United States without a reference or a model.