Even from a distance, the photograph has a disturbing effect — children at a picnic while fire blazes on the ground, licking the low-hanging branches of a tree. A closer look throws up another surreal element: the children aren’t human, those life-like forms are plastic mannequins simulating childish expressions. For 20 years, iconic French photographer Bernard Faucon has held critics across the world in a grip that veers between shock and fascination with his genre of “true fiction”. Now, for the first time, the 58-year-old brings to Delhi the works that form an important landmark in the history of European photography.

A photograph never lies so what Faucon did in the 1970s was near-impossible — he used his camera to create fiction, staging his images in a way similar to theatre directors presenting their plays. “Through the mannequins, I have discovered one of the powers of photograph — a way of giving life to what doesn’t have life. This is the opposite of the deathly fixity of the instant photo of a living being,” says Faucon in Delhi, on his first India trip.

As Myriam Kryger, director of Alliance Francaise, organizers of Faucon’s retrospective, says, “His photographs are like reading a storybook rather than the newspaper to know the world.” Faucon won the Grand Prix National in 1989, and the Prix Leonard de Vinci in 1991. Other photographers like Pierre et Gilles, Sandy Skoglund, Boyd Web, Joel-Peter Witkin, Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman tried their hands at the mis en scene, creating a trend for “invented images” or “fabricated images” that culminated in the 1980s and ended by mid-1990s when digital photography became a norm. A fine artist before he picked up the camera, Faucon’s works have a strong poetic quality that’s highlighted by the use of colours. “It is more difficult to make art with beauty because the ugly reality is naturally photogenic,” he says. Children — sometimes real boys and girls — mingle with mannequins in his images. The Secret shows two mannequins of boys huddled in the darkness while other pictures reveal children playing in the sky, water and amid fire, their innocence defying the elements.