Le « rêve américain » et sa fin : de la photographie à la sculpture, aller-retour = The «American Dream» and Its Dissolution : From Photography to Sculpture and back

The essay follows the path of the «American dream» imagery, which found one of its most famous and celebrated expressions in a photograph, Lunch atop a Skyscraper. In 1989, Duane Hanson presented a hyper-realistic sculpture that clearly refers to the very same imagery. However, compared to the serenity and confidence in the future that shone through the photograph, Lunch Break conveys a completely different atmosphere, suggesting that the «American dream» has been slowly turning into a nightmare. By adopting a phenomenological approach, we will show that the change of medium contributed greatly to the radical change in the meaning of the imagery itself, and this, in turn, will allow us to see all the tragic consequences of the «American dream». Duane Hanson’s work has been remediated and resemantized in 2003 by another US artist, Sharon Lockhart. By examining this very last stage of our iconic journey, we shall show that writing a «biography» of an imagery means to provide a biography of a whole nation.