United States, 2003 – 2009
 
Travelling around the United States every year between 2003 and 2009, Richard Pak carried out his series Pursuit, choosing to focus on two Americas. That of the middle class, living the universally accepted ‘American dream’, and that of the ‘little people’ on the fringes of this mirage, living in their forever immobile mobile homes, the America that populates Raymond Carver’s short stories.
 
 
“Pursuit. The title alludes to the Declaration of Independence of the United States, which mentions everyone’s right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. Pursuing is always possible, but achieving seems more challenging. Unfortunately, the ‘American dream’ is, for many individuals, a faint mirage glimpsed through television screens. By traveling to this country that has fascinated him for so long, the photographer didn’t just settle for verifying if the mental images generated within him by various influences truly belonged to a tangible existence. His primary aim is the experience of encounter and closeness with beings, to lead us into the heart of a fiction modelled on real life: a story whose source is autobiographical, as we can see from the chronicle of these encounters he wrote, gathered in the collection ‘Please, come again’. The themes are also Carverian, the photographer makes no secret of being a fan of the narratives of the American writer who inspired him, as well as those of John Fante and Truman Capote. Couplehood, separation, dependence, are the leitmotifs of this multi-layered narrative, woven with imagery that is clearly American in its most identifiable form.”
Emmanuel Madec
 
(Excerpt of an essay written by Emmanuel Madec accompanying the exhibition Pursuit at Galerie Le Lieu, Lorient, 2010)