Launched in response to the attacks of September the 11th, America's so-called War on Terror was the defining geo-political venture of the early 21st century. Having already been to the Pentagon and Guantanamo Bay, in 2004 I went to Playas a onetime mining town in New Mexico's high desert to ask what really lay behind this hyper-nationalist act of retribution.
By the time of my first visit, the US Department of Homeland Security had turned the place into a 'real-life' anti-terrorist training centre. Streets and houses that had once been the backdrop of everyday lives were now being used as stage-sets for hostage takings and suicide bombings. The few residents that remained had found work as role-playing victims or terrorists.
To capture this shift, I returned to the town repeatedly. Looking for evidence of what happens to a place when it is used to rehearse apocalyptic scenarios on a daily basis. A hollowing out? A sense that reality has been inverted? Or even that it might itself have been taken hostage by the dramatic stories then convulsing America.
During the course of my trips I ended up delving further into New Mexico's military past. The first atom bomb test. Pioneering rocket science. Even the Roswell UFO landings. This broader enquiry culminated with the publication of my book Notes du désert (Grasset, Paris, 2017). Mixing fact, fiction and photographic evidence, this hybrid work navigates its way through the same hazy terrain of truth and illusion that has increasingly come to define the US.