ABSTRACT
In Patrick Faigenbaum's photographs of today's Italian nobility at home in their ancestral Renaissance and Baroque palaces, many might be tempted to see only the voyeuristic pleasure of the voyager-esthete, given to Jamesian ruminations and the worst kind of nostalgia. Time spreads across a room in Faigenbaum's photographs, hangs there, with almost palpable materiality. A good deal of the conception of Faigenbaum's photographs rests in the laborious extraction of a singular configuration of relative tonal values from the information stored in the negative. The density of depth, so striking an emblem of time in the photographs of Florence and Rome, has been displaced, condensed in a depth of density. The milky diffusion of light in the photographs of Naples comes down, in the end, to an afterglow in the darkroom: a pushing of the film, a matt, veiled paper, an extra painted dot to enhance relief, and a third, crucial exposure of the print to ambient light.
