Live a photographic experience through a video game, as it could have taken place in real life, but “without the hair in the wind”. Grand-Theft-Auto Five, a role-playing and action video game, mimics the American West within an open world. It gives the opportunity to explore a décor meticulously crafted on the basis of reality but also nourished by a collective memory, that of a mythical Far-West, theatre of all possible.

Thus, the virtual experience inside the Sonora Desert (USA) or rather Senora (GTA-V) appears as a facsimile: not only in the ability of the game to imitate reality, illusory but striking, but above all, in the exploration that simulates the feeling of a landscape photographer imagining himself treading this earth for the first time.

Sébastien Arrighi