After many

Rap is a story of spaces. And for Simon Bouillère, it's more precisely the Dirty South that constitutes the Southern States. He chose to delve, through photography, into the interstices around Atlanta, Houston and Memphis.

Rap is a story of spaces. Because it was born in the United States; for us French, it's always been “down there”. And for Simon Bouillère, it's more precisely the Dirty South that constitutes the Southern States. He chose to delve, through photography, into the interstices around Atlanta, Houston and Memphis. Around, because you're never really in town. Everything is still suburb and urban forest, as the first image in the book shows. From there, the photographer unfolds a sensitive cartography of this territory, navigating between familiar figures: the car, the recording studio, portraits of rappers; and less expected brilliances : portraits of children, natural landscapes, the frat house, that wasp behind glass. The book recounts Simon Bouillère's quest to find the right distance to photograph this territory, at first remote, then made familiar by the music. The first images in the sequence show us arriving in the territory, which we're getting closer to, until this graffiti evoking the execution of George Stinney, a young African-American killed at the age of 14: the first shock. Because After many works on this dialectic, between the extreme youth of shattered lives, life at full speed to make the most of every moment advocated by rap, and omnipresent death. In addition to George Stinney, it's the figure of Young Dolph, evoked on the cover, that acts as a memento mori - we must remember that we're going to die, but also remember the dead. Simon Bouillère is also working on an intuition about the United States: everything there is representation. The motif of the image within the image unfolds: portrait subjects wear tattoos on their faces, billboards cover the walls, American history is presented in the form of figurines, Nicolas Cage appears to us behind the flare of a flash. The territory is haunted by the violence of its past, which inhabits it in the form of these spectral images, and Simon Bouillère is a witness to it. In this capacity, the titles he proposes for each image evoke a historical fact linked to the territory, an anecdote about local rappers, or his personal situation at the time of shooting. "Two years after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq“ and ”Three years after leaving Iraq" confront each other. At the end of the book, in the essay Nicolas Pellion writes around the images of After many, it's this tension between the space made tangible by photography and the rich imagination of Southern rap that also emerges. The journalist, a specialist in American rap (L'Enfer sur Terre. Une décennie de rap-fiction, Audimat Editions, 2024), offers another exploration of the territory they both discovered and fantasized through rap fiction. But only Simon Bouillère made the journey there; surrounded by these stories, told and lived by others (rappers, journalists, film-makers), he attempts to restore a sensitive experience through a photographic book.