Anarene grew out of an eight-year photographic project by Mikel Bastida in the United States. Starting from the image evoked by the ghost town in Archer County, Texas, portrayed in Peter Bogdanovich's film adaptation of Larry McMurtry's novel The Last Picture Show, the photographer travelled across the country seeking images and stories that cinema had left behind.
 
The photographs show an America battered by narrative: a land consumed by its own myth, landscapes that become a chronicle of cinema's power, images of images depicting places that matter for what they have represented rather than what they are. Anarene presents a territory full of lost and forgotten people and objects, their stories surviving on the margins, suspended in a time and space taken from them. With the United States as its backdrop, this volume gives value to fragments found among the ruins of fiction.