After a road trip in the Alps, Mathieu Le Lay comes back with a series of pictures and a short movie titled West Empire, directed during a journey in the US South Western : in California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. He captured all the beauty of this deserts empire, a few inhabitants searching for freedom without any notion of time and all these abandoned houses. By looking to the past, this photographer manages to reanimate a past era through life testimonies, encounters and a film.