L'eclairement

L'eclairement collects the core of Patrick Faigenbaum's black-and-white photography, most of it never published before this book.

Faigenbaum trained as a painter before turning to photography in the early 1970s, working under the influence of Richard Avedon, W. Eugene Smith, and Bill Brandt. He began by photographing friends and family, then widened his focus to Parisian society and Italian aristocratic families. His portraits from these years place frontal figures against their surroundings, echoing the painted portraiture that had documented aristocratic families for centuries before him. He has since extended that same still, deliberate attention to still life subjects. Editions Xavier Barral published this 120-page clothbound volume in 2014, with text by Jean-François Chevrier, gathering roughly ninety photographs that trace the arc of Faigenbaum's work in black and white.

Faigenbaum's portraits sit at the point where documentary photography and painted portrait tradition meet, an approach he has carried from his early pictures of Parisian and Italian families into his later still lifes.