Model Pictures

A photograph never lies so what Faucon did in the 1970s was near-impossible — he used his camera to create fiction,staging his images in a way similar to theatre directors presenting their plays. “Through the mannequins,I have discovered one of the powers of photograph — a way of giving life to what doesn’t have life. This is the opposite of the deathly fixity of the instant photo of a living being,” says Faucon in Delhi,on his first India trip.

As Myriam Kryger,director of Alliance Francaise,organizers of Faucon’s retrospective,says,“His photographs are like reading a storybook rather than the newspaper to know the world.” Faucon won the Grand Prix National in 1989,and the Prix Leonard de Vinci in 1991. Other photographers like Pierre et Gilles,Sandy Skoglund,Boyd Web,Joel-Peter Witkin,Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman tried their hands at the mis en scene,creating a trend for “invented images” or “fabricated images” that culminated in the 1980s and ended by mid-1990s when digital photography became a norm. A fine artist before he picked up the camera,Faucon’s works have a strong poetic quality that’s highlighted by the use of colours. “It is more difficult to make art with beauty because the ugly reality is naturally photogenic,” he says. Children — sometimes real boys and girls — mingle with mannequins in his images. The Secret shows two mannequins of boys huddled in the darkness while other pictures reveal children playing in the sky,water and amid fire,their innocence defying the elements.

In 1995,Faucon “quit photography because I was convinced that it was over and that this period in the history of photography to which I had subscribed,namely ‘photographic staging’ or ‘photographic settings’ had come to an end”. The collection at the Delhi exhibition,thus,is an essential slice from the history of photography.