The Poetry of the Banal

There is nothing groundbreaking in the photography of Peggy Faye. There is no visual trickery, no Photoshop wizardry, no mixed media or medium-melding avant-gardisme to speak of. And the beauty imparted by the simple subjects is that much purer for it. And that much more enduring.

Faye’s exhibition, Photographies, is as simple in aim as in title: to return a sense of poetry to the everyday. It is the fine art of photography distilled down to its essence, and Faye’s work succeeds in reminding us of everything that is most powerful in the medium.

The images unfolding before us depict a sequence of familiar scenes: people waiting for the metro in Paris or Tokyo; a woman strolling, pensive, through an alleyway in Seoul; a man resting on the curb outside his restaurant, his head in the clouds, and smoking a cigarette; a group of youths, sun-soaked and tattooed, hanging around their cars in a yard in Verdun; an array of shoddy doorways and window frames, darkened lanes and graffiti tags, in nameless streets and back alleys from Montreal to Japan, France to Korea.

Each or any one could be your neighbourhood back lane. Each or any your metro platform. Or even you. It is this universality of the human experience which inspires Faye’s work, and which weaves one seemingly random scene to the next. Yet these isolated fragments of the mundane serve a far greater purpose than merely uniting us across diverse cultures. Faye has captured the banal in the everyday, has framed it, distanced it, and then held it up to the viewer’s glare. Staring back at us we see our own inglorious existences, our own faded everyday. And there is poetry there.

This, perhaps, is the singular magic of photography, and Faye’s series serves as evocation. It brings art down to earth from the abstract, and in the process helps elevate the earth — the mundane, the banal, the everyday — to the realm of art. In this way, it is maybe the only visual art form, if not the only art form at all, which can truly claim to be the bridge between the artist’s imaginary and the real. And therein lays its special, almost guttural, force.

It is frequently said that photography is “painting with light.” A more accurate description, however, jumps to mind when viewing Faye’s images: the world itself is the photographer’s palette, their sight the first stroke of the brush.

If this is true, of course, then we are all artists inside, or can be. We only have to learn to see.

Peggy Faye’s Photographies is on exhibition at L’espace contemporain until December 30.