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.
