A Golden Distance

'A Golden Distance' explores the legacy of an American soldier sheltered by a Belgian family during the Battle of the Bulge. An 80-year tale of two families who kept in touch through generations and now face an ideological and political divide.

In 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, an American soldier found shelter with my great-grandparents in Belgium. His name was Normand and he was 19 - the same age as my grandfather Fernand. After the war, he returned to New Hampshire and married Pauline.

What might have remained a simple wartime anecdote gave rise to a correspondence that lasted more than fifty years. Pauline and my grandmother Irène — two women who never met — exchanged letters, photographs and Christmas gifts, weaving an unlikely bond across the ocean.

As a teenager, I continued the letter exchange — first with Pauline, then with her youngest son, Michael. We met several times over the last thirty years. Michael, in particular, had a strong desire to understand his father's story.

But the person I have truly sought to understand is Michael himself.

Curious, smart and outwardly kind, he reveals another side of himself in the political and social views he shares unfiltered on social media. Through his conservative — and at times radical — stances, I began to see a fractured America emerge: rigid in its values, fearful of the other, drawn toward isolation. I perceived — sometimes with astonishment, sometimes with a worried distance — the mutations of a country I once idealized.

This family history once stood as a symbol of what war had threatened to destroy: the possibility of connection, of a dialogue between strangers divided by language, culture and an ocean.

This project unfolds in that space of entanglement — between family memory, political turmoil and social upheaval. Today, in a world where nationalist rhetoric resurfaces and bridges seem rarer than walls, I question the legacy of these letters, photographs, and faces on paper — silent witnesses whispering the possibility of a more empathetic world.

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The book dummy provided is not a (poor) design attempt but rather a way for me to organize pictures and thoughts so that I can explain the essence of the project. As an illustration, I don't intend to use all the Facebook screenshots shown in the dummy, but I thought they are necessary to bring a layer that I felt did not transpire from the photographs. However I think I should limit the amount and balance them a bit better.

Likewise, my objective for the book is to find someone to help me restructure the content so that I can get the essence of the story in an original, innovative way.