Mister K.

02/17/1958. Mister K leaves home and does not return until eight months later. Eight months during which he crosses the United States by car, immersed in his memories, driving at a frantic pace to what seems to be the end of the world.

Visual artist, Sylvie Meunier collects vernacular photographs, a material that she seizes and reappropriates to construct imaginary stories. In Mister K , Meunier combines, for the first time, her work of collecting images with fictional writing by playing with the photographic codes of B&W and those of the narrative of the detective novel. Her story immerses the reader in an atmosphere that is half-thriller, half-autofiction. The narrator flees an event that is supposed to be traumatic: like a road movie , along highways and motels, he recounts his childhood memories and those of a beloved woman who mysteriously disappeared…

In this “photographic novel” where images and textual incisions alternate, Sylvie Meunier leads a plot bordering on the fantastic. The genres mix to create a singular work: at once a book of photographs, a literary story, a cinematographic fiction, a psychological investigation… The visual power of the images and the narrative rhythm conducted in the mode of the “I” draw the reader into a universe that is both strange and familiar, that of an America of the Beat Generation , a golden age of Hollywood film noir.