The story begins the 17th of February 1958, on the steps of a house in Oregon, where Mister K decides to wander off on a journey without end, across the United States, submerged and troubled by childhood memories and haunted by his love for a mysterious woman.
Artist Sylvie Meunier uses amateur photographs to weave imaginary stories. The resulting pictorial novels, such as Mister K, question both the photographic medium and literature: fiction and illusion are revisited and interrogated at their respective margins. For the first time, a collection of images is mixed with fictional writing by playing with the codes of black and white photography and of detective novel narrative. Writing and pictures vibrate in concert to compose a plot at the frontier of fantasy. The story immerses the reader in an atmosphere that is half thriller, half auto-biography. The narrator is running away from a seemingly traumatic event; like a road movie, along interminable highways, enigmatic landscapes, solitary motels in the middle of nowhere, glimpses of bodies and blurred faces passing before our eyes so fast we can hardly see them.
In this “photographic novel” where pictures and phrases alternate, genres mix to create a work that is photobook, literary tale, cinematographic fiction, psychological investigation…all at once. The rhythm of the first-person narrative leads the reader into the strange yet familiar universe of the American Beat Generation and the golden age of the Hollywoodian film noir.
