Sylvie Meunier Mister K

As a visual artist, Sylvie Meunier collects vernacular photographs, a living material that she seizes and reappropriates to construct imaginary narratives. For Mister K, she plays on the atmospheres and photographic codes of B&W and, for the first time, combines the work of collecting images with that of writing. The story plunges the reader into an atmosphere that is part detective story, part auto-fiction. The narrator is fleeing a supposedly traumatic event: like a road-movie, as he travels along highways and motels, he spins out his childhood memories and those of a beloved woman who mysteriously disappeared…
02.17.1958. Mister K leaves home, only to return eight months later. Eight months during which he drives across the United States, immersed in his memories, driving at a frantic pace to what seems to be the end of the world.
In this “photographic novel”, where images alternate with textual incisions, Sylvie Meunier leads an intrigue bordering on the fantastic. Genres mingle to create a singular work: part photography book, part literary narrative, part cinematic fiction, part psychological investigation… The visual power of the images and the narrative rhythm, draw the reader into a universe that is both strange and familiar, that of Beat Generation America, the golden age of Hollywood film noir.