Having exhibited around Europe in recent years, French photographer Jean-Michel Fauquet's works are currently on show for the first time in Asia. "Ordalies," or "ordeals" -- an exhibition co-organized by the Taiwan International Visual Arts Center (
Fauquet is receiving increasing recognition for his black-and-white photos manipulated with pencils and brushes to appear like sketches. The 65 photos on show encompass Jean-Michel Fauquet's photographic career of 30 years.
An autobiographical still-life series set in his birthplace shows how decrepit the village has become -- made more poignant by his childhood memories of its better days. A series of decaying bananas was Fauquet's earliest attempt at showing the reality of things -- that they are not always perfectly fresh and pretty. There are also a dozen landscapes, intentionally shot out of focus.
The "Ordalies" series, one of his latest and the main part of the exhibition, consists of 35 close-ups of what Fauquet terms "unnamable objects" -- to express a sense of oppressive pain and inescapable persecution.
"When I was born, in 1950, it was only four years after the Holocaust and Jews were returning to France. I felt so sorry for them," Fauquet said. "Later I found the whole history of the 20th century was characterized by horrors, by men killing men. I wanted to convey that horror and to create that terrible sense of oppression."
To this end, Fauquet started making sketches of imaginary objects, most of which look like a cross between farming tools and machine parts. He made the objects based on his sketches with metals and wood, and took photos of them. These negatives are then scratched with pencils and other pens to resemble the sketches.
Most viewers in Europe, Fauquet said, thought these objects were ancient instruments of torture.
Spending his early life in Lourdes, the southern French town famous for Catholic pilgrims drinking its spring waters for miraculous cures, Fauquet has seen all kinds of physical and mental suffering. He admitted that his ability to evoke the atmosphere of pain in his photos was partly due to what he saw in Lourdes.
In some past exhibitions, the original sketches were shown alongside the photos, but they are not on show this time. Viewers can find them in some past exhibition catalogues in the gallery.
Fauquet explained his deliberate efforts to create the subjects of his photos and heavily manipulate them were the result of his reluctance to be a photographer. "I hate photography," he said. "I used to work in a photography company when I was 18. It forced me to take immaculate images of impeccably set up subjects for commercial purposes. I didn't think the sleek images were the way things really were. Although I'm not trying to tell people the truth, I would like to express my own views of them," Fauquet said.
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Ordalies will run through April 29 at Taiwan International Visual Arts Center, 29, Lane 45, Liaoning St, Taipei. (
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