Discovered in the early 1980s, Bernard Faucon’s work is currently associated with ‘mise en scène’ photography, staged or fabricated photographs. He has created an original and poetic world with colourful, elaborately constructed images that mix reality and fiction.
Present in the world’s most important public and private collections, Bernard Faucon is one of the few contemporary French photographers to have achieved international recognition. His fame, particularly in Japan and the United States, is enormous and reflects a body of work that is at once modern and romantic, and rooted in universal themes.
Born in 1950, Bernard Faucon spent the first 20 years of his life in Apt, a small town in the south of France, where his parents built a summer house. In 1967, his grandmother gave him his first camera, a Semflex, with which he photographed the people closest to him as well as his first landscapes.
In 1971, Bernard Faucon moved to Paris, where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. There he was deeply influenced by the thought of the great Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, with whom he became friends and who had a great influence on him. From 1965, he began to paint, making reliefs. But it was not until 1976 that he bought a Hasselblad camera and decided to devote himself to photography, producing his first photographic ”mises en scène”. Using mannequins, which he collected like ready-mades, he reconstructed powerful moments of an idealised childhood. His mannequins became real characters in fables that he sometimes mixed with real children. Among his various themes, he favoured the natural elements: water, fire, snow; as well as the essential rituals of this young age, such as snacks, games and parties. The titles of his photographs: L’enfant qui vole, La neige qui brûle, La comète, L’enterrement des jouets (The child who flies, The burning show, The comet, The toy funeral) evoke a magical world halfway between dream and reality.
Discovered in 1979 in two exhibitions, the first in Paris (at the Agathe Gaillard Gallery) and the second in New York (at Castelli Graphics), he quickly gained international recognition.
In 1981, however, he abandoned the use of mannequins in order to concentrate on landscapes and interiors that contain only the traces of a presence that has already disappeared. A glass of water abandoned on a side table under a full moon; a field of lavender where brightly coloured pieces of laundry hang to dry on a clothesline; a party in shadowy semi-darkness where lights can only be seen from a distance. He has also photographed fires that set nature ablaze. Like Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings, Bernard Faucon has created a strange, beautiful, metaphysical atmosphere in his work.
Gradually, his work was structured around several important series that evoke the passage of time, the fragility of the moment and the ephemeral quality of happiness.
Simultaneously a set designer, stylist, decorator, costume designer, accessory specialist and lighting designer, Bernard Faucon has created rigorously composed images that require weeks of preparation.
“I think in series… after a very abstract phase, I reconstruct the image from details, objects, situations… ….
Everything is lit, brightened up, even on the outside,
but no effects are added to the film. I don’t use filters. If I want it out of focus, I create a little smoke.
I photograph what I want, and even if it only lasts for the moment of the shot, I can believe that I have seen it.” (From an interview with Hervé Guibert, Le Monde 14/01/1981).
He produced only a few dozen photographs a year, always in colour and using an old technique, the Fresson print, which produces a patina similar to that of painting. After the series Les Grandes Vacances (1975-1977) and Evolution probable du temps (1981-1984), he invented Les Chambres d’Amour (1984-1987). In empty rooms, embers smoulder, wild grasses overtake the floor, a surface of cold milk seeps out like a lake. Ice, straw, dried flowers, an unmade bed make up his poetic furnishings, the last refuges of his intimacy, in which the artist’s romantic questions and concerns are reflected as if in a mirror.
In 1987, Bernard Faucon discovered Asia and, inspired by the golden light of gods and temples, created Les Chambres d’Or (1987-1989). Gold leaf, applied to walls, landscapes and bodies, sublimates and transforms a reality in which the material and the spiritual, the Orient and the Occident, clash violently.
This was followed by a more radical series, Les idoles et les sacrifices (1989-1991), which juxtaposes 12 portraits of adolescents bathed in a golden light with a series of 12 landscapes crossed by a bloody wound.
Bernard Faucon exhibited his work at the Yvon Lambert gallery in Paris, at a time when the Espace Photographique de Paris was also holding a retrospective of his work. During this period, he published several books, particularly in Japan, and began to travel in Asia and the Middle East.
Les Ecritures (1991-1993), phrases inscribed in the landscape, marked a real turning point in his work. For the series, he wrote text by hand, enlarged it, made the letters out of plywood, covered the letters with reflective tape and then installed them in places he had chosen. Artificial light revealed the text. But Bernard Faucon did not make installations, he made photographs. Although his work could easily be classified as contemporary art installation, he remained faithful to Fresson prints, the largest of which do not exceed 60 x 60 cm. After inscribing words in the landscape, he began to inscribe them on bodies, even on the skin itself.
A final series entitled La fin de l’image (1993-1995) marked the end of his photographic work. Fifty-one small-format photographs, framed in black, unfold like a film. On each of them, short sentences can be read: ”tout pour un baiser et la vie avec”, ”tu me caches le monde”, ”j’étais aimé” (all for a kiss and life with it; you hide the world from me; I was loved)… and on the last, simply the word ”fin” (end) appears.
In 1997, Bernard Faucon decided to suspend the production of his photographic images. Conscious that he had said all he could with this medium, he turned to writing. “Even the greatest do not know how to stop time, he says. Either I regenerate myself dramatically or I move on to something else. One thing is certain, the history of the image is coming to an end” (in an interview with Michel Guerrin, Le Monde, 10 June 1995)”.
From 1997 to 2000, he developed a vast project in 20 countries entitled Le plus beau jour de ma jeunesse. With the help of a young writer, Antonin Potoski, he invited 100 young people in each country, armed with instant cameras, to a party and asked them to photograph their loved ones and moments of happiness. Selected and exhibited together for the first time at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris in November 2000, these images toured the world, accompanied by a book about the project. In 1999, he published his first collection of texts without images, La peur du voyage.
