Views on Château Lafite Rothschild - 2021

Trained in painting and drawing from 1968 to 1973, Patrick Faigenbaum is a photographer of the timeless. In art history, portraits have long been reserved for painters. And Patrick Faigenbaum is first and foremost a portraitist. His compositions remain at the heart of a pictorial tradition.

‘The portraitist of the 1980s became a chronicler of urban life in the 1990s, projecting himself into “city portraits”, as if seized by a current events that he had previously avoided.’

In 1984, during a stay in Venice, he decided to devote a series of photographs to the survivals of the past in the palaces built during the Renaissance and inhabited by the descendants of illustrious families from Florence, Rome and Naples.

Faigenbaum comes from a Russian-Polish Jewish family that was dissolved under the deadly blows of history. He thus entered the very closed circles of an aristocracy whose history has remained unbroken for five centuries.

The first major exhibition dedicated to the career of this important figure in contemporary photography was organised by the Académie de France in Rome, in collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery, in January 2014.