I was strolling around the Marais at the end of February when I stumbled into Galerie Nathalie Obadia right off the Rue de Renard. While I had never heard of the gallery before I felt something pulling me to go inside. I guess I was optimistic about what I might encounter in great part because of its location. The gallery is only steps away from many well-known exhibition spaces like the Centre Pompidou. Unsurprisingly, immediately after I stepped inside the front door, I became even more excited by what I saw before me. The current show is made up of works by French artist Patrick Faigenbaum, and is straightforwardly titled Photographies, 1974-2020. Faigenbaum was born in Paris in 1954, and initially trained as a painter. However, in the 1970s his attention shifted to photography. He is well-known today – primarily as a photographer – and his work can be found in the collections of many major museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand in Paris.

At a basic level, it made sense to me that I was so interested in this series of works as photography is one of my favorite mediums. In fact, ever since high school I have been taking pictures on my film camera and working in the dark room. Moreover, beyond my personal relationship with the medium as a maker, I have really enjoyed diving headfirst into the art theory surrounding photography during my time in college.

As I wandered through the gallery and looked closely at the prints on the walls, there was one work that I found most striking. As indicated in the title L’appartement de Suzanne Faigenbaum, (1923-2015), rue de Clichy, Paris, 2016-2021, the work is a set of photographs the artist took of his mother’s apartment after she passed away. Given that the single work is made up of 66 prints in total, it is impossible to discuss every detail of the piece in a text of this length. However, a broad discussion of what he intended to convey with these photographs, and–relatedly–why I am so drawn to them is definitely possible.

For starters, I believe this work caught my eye as a result of its material appearance. Simply put, the piece is hard to miss because of its sheer size: it is humongous. At almost 7 feet tall and 13 feet wide, it easily took up the entire wall it was displayed on. Interestingly, as mentioned before, this massive work is not simply one large image though. It is comprised of 66 individual inkjet prints made from silver negatives. Each print is approximately 1 foot tall, and 1foot wide. These small square prints were placed within thin white frames, and displayed side by side on the wall. Ultimately, it is only once they are arranged in this orderly rectangular grid that each image becomes a constituent part of the larger whole.

In addition to its materiality, I was most struck by this piece because of the close visual relationship between the images in neighboring frames. As a result, a cohesive visual narrative that traverses the entire work begins to emerge as one looks from one frame to the next. In specific terms, in a manner similar to conventional film or comic strips, the imagery of each print appears to visually and conceptually connect with the imagery in the print directly next to it. For example, the three images on the top row–when starting from the left side–are a close-up photo of cut-glass serving trays stacked on a table, a wider angle shot of this same glass table in front of grey wallpaper, and a tiny wooden night table piled high with photos leaning against the same grey wall, respectively.

Thus, these photos are in direct conversation with each other as they all share a visual element with the image before and after them. Moreover, it is logical to say that since a majority of the people viewing this work are readers of English or French, they would likely begin any visual analysis in the top left of the piece they are viewing, and consequently scan to the right with their eyes. In fact, the deliberate nature of this visual connection becomes even more apparent since–as in the example above–the similarity between images is more pronounced as one moves left to right with their eyes across the prints as if they are organized primarily in rows as opposed to if one looks them up and down as if they are in columns.

It should still be noted that in some ways the ordering of the images is also quite unconventional. There is one photograph in the work that appears to figure the front entrance to Faigenbaum’s mother’s building. Generally, images of a building’s exterior are the first view shown to viewers in order to create context for the scene they are going to be shown. However, in this particular work Faigenbaum places this print in the bottom right section of the large grid, thus meaning it is likely one of the last prints viewers of this work would see. As a result it should not be forgotten that in some ways, he also deliberately subverts the conventions of narrative storytelling in this work.

Last while I was primarily shocked by the relationships between the imagery each print showed, in some ways I was even more shocked by the imagery they didn’t show. For example, while they are meant to provide the viewer with visual access to his mother’s apartment, the images deliberately lack one extremely important visual element: her. I think this omission may be related to why I was so drawn to this set of photographs. Now, it should be conceded that since she passed away a year before the first images in the series were taken capturing her within them would have been impossible. However that being said, Faigenbaum could have definitely created this work when she was still alive, and thus included her in the images as a crucial element of what makes the apartment unique. In this way, it is plausible to say that by not directly figuring her, this piece may deliberately leave something to be desired for viewers since they lose an integral part of what made this apartment her apartment. However, on the other hand the fact that he took these photographs after she was gone can also be interpreted as having a powerful positive result. In a sense this choice allows the space to be seen as a continuation of her: even though she is gone these objects provide her with a lasting personal legacy.