Summer Balade

Welcome to the world of Lola James Harper, where there is always room for dreams, encounters, life, and creativity

     Summer Balade is an ode to slowness, to warm summers that seem to last forever, to road trips without a destination, to the freedom of getting in a car with friends or family and letting the day unfold on its own. It's the story of Californian roads traveled to the sound of music, while the landscapes pass by the windows like a living screen, a moving movie. 
     Along the way, we stop whenever something calls to us: a light, a color, a building, a horizon. We photograph strangely familiar scenes, as if they had already been lived, dreamed, or remembered. Everything becomes cinematic: fragments of the lost American dream captured in a palette of sun-bleached colors, neon signs, deserted roads, motels, palm trees, and vast skies. Everything invites us to wander through an America that is both real and imagined, seductive and fragile, powerful in its poetry. Summer Balade is an attempt to share this feeling, like a drawn-out summer song, a road trip with friends, and a succession of sunrises and sunsets. It’s a book about freedom of movement, openness to the world, and the search for beauty at every turn: in sun-warmed colors, in smiles, in the light, and in its silent promise of liberty.
      Lola James Harper and Éditions de La Martinière are joining forces to launch an entirely new collection of photographic art books offering a rare visual and tactile experience. Like the fragrances, films, and music of Lola James Harper, these books invite the reader on an inner journey—a state of contemplation, moving from destination to destination, image to image, color to color. The collection opens with three volumes that set the tone for a publishing adventure meant to unfold across several dozen titles. Each book opens the doors to a world far from tourist circuits and expected landmarks with each page designed as a place where the reader can imagine their own stories from the photographs, evocative titles, and poetic words. Summer Balade is an invitation to step into an endless summer, a visual reverie where every image awakens a unique emotion. 
 

For more than 20 years, Lili, Noé, Céline, and Rami Mekdachi have traveled the world, camera in hand, capturing the places, encounters, and moments that shape human alchemy. Their family art project, Lola James Harper, brings together their images, music, films, and fragrances in a single quest: to celebrate the beauty of inspiring places—those iconic locations that transform our emotions, our bonds, and our stories.