Views on Château Lafite Rothschild - 2021
Patrick Faigenbaum
Trained in painting and drawing from 1968 to 1973, Patrick Faigenbaum is a photographer of timeless subjects. In the history of art, portraits have long been reserved for painters. Patrick Faigenbaum is first and foremost a portraitist. His compositions remain at the heart of a tradition of painting.
“The portraitist of the 1980s becomes a chronicler of the urban in the 1990s through ‘portraits of cities,’ as if seized by a reality that he had until then rather avoided.”
In 1984, during a stay in Venice, he decided to devote a series of photographs to the holdovers of the past in the palaces built during the Renaissance and in which the descendants of illustrious families of Florence, Rome, and Naples live.
Born into a Russian-Polish Jewish family, which he saw shattered by the mortal blows of history, Faigenbaum thus penetrates the almost impervious structure of an aristocracy whose history has not suffered any break for five centuries.
The first major exhibition devoted to the career of this major figure of the contemporary photography scene was organised by the Académie de France in Rome, in collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery, in January 2014.
