Summer Balade is a love letter to slowness, to warm summers that seem never to end, to road trips with no destination, to the quiet freedom of getting into a car with friends or family and letting the day unfold on its own. It is the story of Californian roads traveled to the sound of music, landscapes passing by the windows like a living movie screen, a cinema in motion.
Along the way, one stops whenever something calls out: a light, a color, a building, a horizon. Scenes are photographed that feel strangely familiar, as if already lived, dreamed, or remembered. Everything becomes cinematic: fragments of a lost American dream, captured in a palette of sun-faded colors, neon lights, empty roads, motels, palm trees, and vast skies. Every detail invites us to wander through an America that is both real and imaginary, seductive and fragile, powerful in its poetry.
Summer Balade is a slow song, a stroll made of warmth and stretched time. Summer, wherever it exists, has the power to create a shared feeling: softness, togetherness, simple joy. This book is an invitation to linger in long afternoons, savor mild evenings, look closely at what surrounds us, and take the time to grasp its beauty. It is about capturing fleeting moments and gently holding onto their poetry before they disappear: amber light, iconic cars, familiar melodies drifting from open windows. Songs about love, connection, and belief in a shared horizon. Each photograph bears a title with a discreet reference to the folk-rock anthems of the 1970s and 1980s, the soundtrack accompanying Lili’s travels and giving rhythm to the book.
Lili chose to capture moments that are both cinematic and almost stolen, as if pulled from a paradisiacal 1970s fantasy. Because the 1970s are, in part, a dream, an era when the world seemed slower, less saturated with information, leaving more room for imagination. Yet the desire for those endless summers still lives within us, something we hold onto and continue to believe in.
Summer Balade is an attempt to share that feeling, like a summer song that stretches on, a road trip with friends, sunsets and sunrises following one another. A book about freedom of movement, openness to the world, and the quest for beauty at every turn: in sun-kissed colors, in smiles, in light, and in the quiet promise of freedom.
Rami Mekdachi was born in Beirut and grew up between Paris, England, and North America.
The world of music called him with a guitar, a punk-rock band and the raw joy of making noise together. Music taught him how to travel, how to speak without words, how to meet people whose language he did not know. Over the years, Rami developed other languages: photography, cinema, fragrance.
His work explores the poetry hidden in the simple gestures of everyday life. He has traveled around the world with his family, Céline, Lili, and Noé, gathering images, songs, fragrances, and stories that remind us the world inspires dreaming.
Through his films, photographs, and music, Rami seeks to convey a simple idea: in a world shaped by information, precision, and control, we should also take the time to look, smell, listen, dream, and allow ourselves to be transported by the magic and poetry of everyday life.
Together, this forms a rare sensory universe called Lola James Harper, which exudes the gentle intensity of moments that are captured without being imprisoned, and which continue to live on through the senses of the viewer, listener or reader.
His first feature film WITH was awarded for its cinematography, direction, and original score, affirming the scope of his artistic voice, through which he shares his approach to life: “Life is a song we play together.”
Through music, cinema, dance and photography, Lili Mekdachi practices the arts and crosses disciplines in the spirit of freedom that defines her family.
A multidisciplinary artist and contemporary dancer trained at the prestigious Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London after several years at the Paris Conservatory, Lili brings to her photography a choreographic sensitivity, an instinctive relationship to space, balance, and movement dynamics.
As a filmmaker, she was nominated at the Cannes Film Awards for her first short film CRAFT & POWDER and is currently developing her first feature film.
As a composer, she co-created the award-winning original score for WITH and has collaborated with internationally renowned artists Joshua of Seventeen.
As a founding member of Lola James Harper, Lili has traveled around the world with her family, shaping her vision and compositional style.
What defines her visual writing style on her argentic film camera is her singular ability to capture the precise moment when reality becomes cinematic. Her images carry a gentle tension, an equilibrium of bodies, colors, light, and atmosphere, with a choreography that remains entirely organic and natural.
A key element of her visual universe is her relationship with music. Lili enjoys titling her photographs with references to songs from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, pop, rock, new wave, melodies that continue to shape generations. These titles are her way of embedding music within the image.
Her photography floats between reality and reverie, like scenes from a film one feels they have already lived.
A visual artist, musician, producer and athlete, for many years Noé Mekdachi has developed a physical, rhythmic, and sensory approach to creation.
Trained at the prestigious Istituto Marangoni, he builds a transversal artistic language nourished by image, sound, movement, and performance.
As a founding member of Lola James Harper, he has traveled around the world with his family, instilled in him a particular sensitivity to time, color, and the vibration of spaces.
Always engaged in high-level sports practice, Noé conceives creation as a space of precision, endurance, and listening. Sport, like music, hones his innate relationship to rhythm, breath, tension, and balance, qualities that directly infuse his visual work.
He has long shaped the visual, graphic, and color identity of Lola James Harper and is notably the creator of the iconic Palm Tree logo.
Alongside his visual work, Noé is an award-winning drummer, composer, and producer. Alongside Rami and Lili Mekdachi, he composed and performed the original score for WITH. He currently collaborates with an eclectic group of artists, developing music where rhythm, texture, and emotion dialogue with image.
Drawing from a multitude of photographic archives by his family, Noé assembles images with the precision of a film editor. For him, a sequence is built through its color palette, image by image, emotion by emotion, sensation by sensation, deeply embodied and faithful to the spirit of Lola James Harper.
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Summer Balade is a love letter to slowness, to warm summers that seem never to end, to road trips with no destination, to the quiet freedom of getting into a car with friends or family and letting the day unfold on its own. It is the story of Californian roads traveled to the sound of music, landscapes passing by the windows like a living movie screen, a cinema in motion.
Along the way, one stops whenever something calls out: a light, a color, a building, a horizon. Scenes are photographed that feel strangely familiar, as if already lived, dreamed, or remembered. Everything becomes cinematic: fragments of a lost American dream, captured in a palette of sun-faded colors, neon lights, empty roads, motels, palm trees, and vast skies. Every detail invites us to wander through an America that is both real and imaginary, seductive and fragile, powerful in its poetry.
Summer Balade is a slow song, a stroll made of warmth and stretched time. Summer, wherever it exists, has the power to create a shared feeling: softness, togetherness, simple joy. This book is an invitation to linger in long afternoons, savor mild evenings, look closely at what surrounds us, and take the time to grasp its beauty. It is about capturing fleeting moments and gently holding onto their poetry before they disappear: amber light, iconic cars, familiar melodies drifting from open windows. Songs about love, connection, and belief in a shared horizon. Each photograph bears a title with a discreet reference to the folk-rock anthems of the 1970s and 1980s, the soundtrack accompanying Lili’s travels and giving rhythm to the book.
Lili chose to capture moments that are both cinematic and almost stolen, as if pulled from a paradisiacal 1970s fantasy. Because the 1970s are, in part, a dream, an era when the world seemed slower, less saturated with information, leaving more room for imagination. Yet the desire for those endless summers still lives within us, something we hold onto and continue to believe in.
Summer Balade is an attempt to share that feeling, like a summer song that stretches on, a road trip with friends, sunsets and sunrises following one another. A book about freedom of movement, openness to the world, and the quest for beauty at every turn: in sun-kissed colors, in smiles, in light, and in the quiet promise of freedom.
Rami Mekdachi was born in Beirut and grew up between Paris, England, and North America.
The world of music called him with a guitar, a punk-rock band and the raw joy of making noise together. Music taught him how to travel, how to speak without words, how to meet people whose language he did not know. Over the years, Rami developed other languages: photography, cinema, fragrance.
His work explores the poetry hidden in the simple gestures of everyday life. He has traveled around the world with his family, Céline, Lili, and Noé, gathering images, songs, fragrances, and stories that remind us the world inspires dreaming.
Through his films, photographs, and music, Rami seeks to convey a simple idea: in a world shaped by information, precision, and control, we should also take the time to look, smell, listen, dream, and allow ourselves to be transported by the magic and poetry of everyday life.
Together, this forms a rare sensory universe called Lola James Harper, which exudes the gentle intensity of moments that are captured without being imprisoned, and which continue to live on through the senses of the viewer, listener or reader.
His first feature film WITH was awarded for its cinematography, direction, and original score, affirming the scope of his artistic voice, through which he shares his approach to life: “Life is a song we play together.”
Through music, cinema, dance and photography, Lili Mekdachi practices the arts and crosses disciplines in the spirit of freedom that defines her family.
A multidisciplinary artist and contemporary dancer trained at the prestigious Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London after several years at the Paris Conservatory, Lili brings to her photography a choreographic sensitivity, an instinctive relationship to space, balance, and movement dynamics.
As a filmmaker, she was nominated at the Cannes Film Awards for her first short film CRAFT & POWDER and is currently developing her first feature film.
As a composer, she co-created the award-winning original score for WITH and has collaborated with internationally renowned artists Joshua of Seventeen.
As a founding member of Lola James Harper, Lili has traveled around the world with her family, shaping her vision and compositional style.
What defines her visual writing style on her argentic film camera is her singular ability to capture the precise moment when reality becomes cinematic. Her images carry a gentle tension, an equilibrium of bodies, colors, light, and atmosphere, with a choreography that remains entirely organic and natural.
A key element of her visual universe is her relationship with music. Lili enjoys titling her photographs with references to songs from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, pop, rock, new wave, melodies that continue to shape generations. These titles are her way of embedding music within the image.
Her photography floats between reality and reverie, like scenes from a film one feels they have already lived.
A visual artist, musician, producer and athlete, for many years Noé Mekdachi has developed a physical, rhythmic, and sensory approach to creation.
Trained at the prestigious Istituto Marangoni, he builds a transversal artistic language nourished by image, sound, movement, and performance.
As a founding member of Lola James Harper, he has traveled around the world with his family, instilled in him a particular sensitivity to time, color, and the vibration of spaces.
Always engaged in high-level sports practice, Noé conceives creation as a space of precision, endurance, and listening. Sport, like music, hones his innate relationship to rhythm, breath, tension, and balance, qualities that directly infuse his visual work.
He has long shaped the visual, graphic, and color identity of Lola James Harper and is notably the creator of the iconic Palm Tree logo.
Alongside his visual work, Noé is an award-winning drummer, composer, and producer. Alongside Rami and Lili Mekdachi, he composed and performed the original score for WITH. He currently collaborates with an eclectic group of artists, developing music where rhythm, texture, and emotion dialogue with image.
Drawing from a multitude of photographic archives by his family, Noé assembles images with the precision of a film editor. For him, a sequence is built through its color palette, image by image, emotion by emotion, sensation by sensation, deeply embodied and faithful to the spirit of Lola James Harper.
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Summer Balade Collection
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