With the title of his series The Kingdom, Stéphane Lavoué, right from the beginning, puts us in a double reality. It is a very concrete “kingdom”, that of the Northeast Kingdom, a region of lakes and forests in the northeast of Vermont, one of the least populated states in the United States (twelve inhabitants per square kilometer). However, it is also a fictional territory constructed by his photographs, a country of melancholic haze inhabited by unique figures, each seeming to reign over their own world, reawakening the dreams of Henry David Thoreau, who, close by in Maine and Massachusetts, lived a life of rebelliousness and fusion with nature in the 19th century.
