Photographs by Patrick Faigenbaum. At the Vancouver Art Gallery in downtown Vancouver
On the ground floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery there's some beautiful photographs by the French photographer Patrick Faigenbaum. I'd never heard of Faigenbaum before which is too bad.
"It now seems clear," wrote the British art critic John Berger way back in 1968, "that photography deserves to be considered as though it were not a fine art. It looks as though photography is going to outlive painting and sculpture as we have thought of them since the Renaissance."
Faigenbaum's photos dispute Berger's first point. But they may support his second belief.
His photos fall into three or four types. There are still lifes taken mostly in Sardinia. There are portraits taken in France, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Italy. Faigenbaum has also taken some beautiful
colored photos of French and Sardinian landscapes and townscapes.
Fiagenbaum grew up in France in the 1970"s. First trained as a painter, he later switched to photography. "He is part of a generation who during the 1970"s," says a comment on the gallery wall," began to consider photography on the grand scale of historical easel painting." In line with that belief, Faigenbaum's photos are big. One photo of a farmer in a barn takes up one side of a gallery wall. Only a set of 26 small snapshots of a garden all lined up together stand out as an exception to the general rule of the photos's large size. All the rest of the photos take up lots of space.
My favourite photos by Faigenbaum in this exhibition are his black and white portraits of Italian aristocrats. Here, families pose for the camera in their houses, surrounded by expensive furniture and family treasures. But maybe just as powerful are Faigenbaum's landscapes and portraits of young, middle aged and older French people. Here you can see that this man has studied painting and a lot more besides.
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