Jean-Luc Bertini is a renowned portraitist pursuing several long-term projects that regularly take him from east to west. From his first book, Solovki, la bibliothèque perdue (Solovki, the lost library) to Amérique, des écrivains en liberté (America, writers on the loose), his work questions humanity’s fragile place at the heart of his environment. Some sixty years after Robert Frank, he spent a decade traveling across the United States with the same yearning to see. The result was the series Américaines solitudes, in which he invented what Gilles Mora calls in the book’s afterword a “poetics of isolation.”