Bernard Faucon: Les Grandes Vacances (1976-81)
Doesn't time fly?
It's now forty years since the scorching hot summer of '76, when French photographer Bernard Faucon first began assembling material for a five-year project that combined the ravishing, short-lived beauty of actual boys, with the rather more unsettling - though equally mythic - beauty of synthetic beings (in this case mannequins) into a queer form of tableau.
A project which came to be known as Les Grandes Vacances and that might best be described - borrowing if I may from the clinical language of paraphilia - as a work of paedopygmalionism, although I'm fairly certain that the perverse love of boys, be they real or artificial, isn't really the point of these pictures.
What then, one might ask, is the point of these disconcerting images taken from a summer camp pitched deep in the Uncanny Valley?
To be honest, I'm not sure I can answer this question. Even Roland Barthes recognised that the puzzle they pose and leave dangling before our eyes - "which cannot look away and yet cannot pierce their mystery" - is a genuine one and thus never fully solvable.
Ultimately, no photograph, if it's any good, can ever be explained; if we could always articulate what we wanted to say, then no one would bother taking pictures which, far from speaking a thousand words, present an enigmatic, silent, and still form of truth.
It's interesting to note, however, that Faucon - a philosophy graduate of the Sorbonne who initially worked as a fine art painter - gave up photography in the mid-1990s and began to reinvent himself as a writer, suggesting that the pen remains not only mightier than the sword, but the camera and the paintbrush too.
See: Roland Barthes, 'Bernard Faucon', in Signs and Images, trans. Chris Carter, (Seagull Books, 2016).
