We're All Going on a Summer Holiday (Notes on the Photography of Bernard Faucon)

Bernard Faucon: Les Grandes Vacances (1976-81)

bernardfaucon.net

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). 

Skinny Mannequin Sparks Outrage

The curious and often heated debate over the size and shape of shop-window dummies is raging once again, following the appearance of a new model in Topshop (second from left in the above image) and a tweet from outraged customer Betty Hopper.

Now, whilst I understand the issue here and can see how display units might (somewhat naively) be thought of as plastic versions of real women and thus, like fashion models, be caught up in the discussion around body image and eating disorders, are stores really promoting anorexia as an aspirational lifestyle by using skinny mannequins? I don't think so. 

In fact, I have more than a little sympathy with those who argue that solid fibreglass mannequins are not meant to be viewed as ideal role models and have more in common with clothes hangers than they do with flesh-and-blood women. Usually, any realistic elements are outweighed by the abstract and frequently headless nature of the design.

In a statement issued by Topshop with reference to the mannequin in question, it's calmly pointed out that "the form is a stylized one designed to have greater impact in store and create a visual focus". The statement continues by saying that the mannequin primarily exists to display clothes and its dimensions simply enable faster dressing and undressing; "it is therefore not meant to be a representation of the average female body".

That's a little disingenuous perhaps, but it's by no means false or an outright lie and I think those who get overexcited on social media and start speaking about 'impressionable teens', or body-shaming those girls who are happily waif-like with their offensive assertion that real women have curves, need to keep things in perspective and be careful what they say.

Not that it's just possibly envious members of the twitterati who make nasty remarks about those girls judged to be underweight; I was surprised and disappointed to read Pascal Bruckner's negative characterization of fashion models as "flat-chested beanpoles". Is the woman with a "fuller-figure" he appears to lust after really a taboo in our society? Again, I don't think so.

Finally, if "emaciated mannequins" (another of Bruckner's pet peeves) cause anorexia and represent the triumph of ascetic idealism's dream of disembodiment, then mightn't plus-size dummies promote obesity?

The Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, certainly thinks so and recently warned that the increasing use of larger mannequins (along with size inflation of labelling) were starting to normalize overweight. This might be a slightly absurd and simplistic claim, but no more so than the one made about the Topshop mannequin.