Bernard Faucon stopped taking photographs in 1995 because his work of more than twenty years came to a preternatural end. He could take it no further. His motivational theme was childhood and childhood comes to an end, but, in an age characterised by a media-driven frenzy to protect our innocents against real and mostly imaginary fears, society declared the youthful form to be not only unbeautiful but obscene.

He bowed out with a huge career retrospective in 2006 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. Without any Anglo-Saxon can't and rant there were morning tours for nursery groups, activity sessions for school-age children, and all the while the Parisian public paid to enter.

Faucon's is a hugely impressive collection -- the very things that childhood dreams are made of. His work falls into five main parts -- Early Works; Mannequins; Rooms of Love; Writings on the Landscape, and a climax of Pasolinean beauty and horror called Idols and Sacrifice.

The early works toe-dip into the main photographic genres of landscape; still life; portraiture and self-portraiture. They are taken in the lowering and rising red light of dawn and dusk -- shadow-speckled children; a graveyard; a rusty bell on a terracotta stone wall; white light on a kitchen table; a blurred silhouette at the window. They are the individualised first works of an artist trying out his craft and searching for his own style -- and one of them is a masterpiece.

Taken in 1967 and printed lifesize for the farewell exhibition, 'Pierre sur la balançoire' is of the artist's brother, aged about twelve. He is standing on a knife-notched log or tree branch. The branch is so angled that the sky is both above and below the boy. We are looking at him -- the boy on his pedestal. His blue hat, blue neckerchief, white shirt and white shorts, and his blue and white patterned socks and shoes are, of course, the colours of the sky cloud-patterned around him. It is as if the boy is of the sky or belongs to the sky. He is standing unerringly straight -- fearlessly at ease as if he isn't quite human. A Joubertian image of perfect boyhood. Pierre's head is turned the side and looking upwards dispassionately at something beyond our view. It is an image created not by nature and not by chance. Faucon had found his theme.

The career breakthrough came in 1976 with 'Les Grandes Vacances' (1976), a series of exquisitely detailed photographic tableaux on the theme of the community of children, in which the roles of children are taken by life-like mannequins. In one astonishing print, a child is flying from a hilltop and forming the apex of a diamond created in the foreground by the boy and three companions. Below and in front of these boys are field after field filled with children at play. The flying boy is holding a white handkerchief. Is this the miracle of flight? or a cliff jump, a suicidal surrender? The blue and white of the children's clothes (one boy's blue shirt is dotted with golden star shapes) suggests the late evening sky, which we see reflected in a rock pool in the centre of the diamond.

There are images of departure -- train trips to the holiday lands; images of sharing -- picked fruit, a comfortable raincoat; and there are many images of children at play. Faucon's children play on the earth, in the sky, in the water and with fire, for these are elemental not sentimental childhood dreams.

Into these dreams of fantastical youth, real boys enter slowly one by one hidden within the crowd of mannequins. There is a real boy sitting on the edge of a busy swimming pool; lying in the surf of the Camargue; caught in a fishing net; a curled infant naked and asleep in a light shafted barn or railway carriage where a boy mannequin looks on and holds a set of keys. A crowd of happy infant dolls look on as a team of young filmmakers shoot a love scene in the hay. There are hints of the divine in many of the photographs, and several scenes of pagan and Christian ritual -- a Sunday-suited boy outside the church of his first communion; a crucifixion; a depiction of 'Tartitius'. The boy who became a Saint after being slaughtered for protecting the Sacrament, is here kneeling, praying and bleeding on a hilltop littered with broken mirrors, and watched by a crowd fortified with wine and armed with a rifle. The boy is real. The crowd are mannequins. It became Faucon's key image.

Faucon's genius is not so much his soaring imagination, nor his mastery of light and lighting and shadow. It is not in his meticulous mise-en scene -- his thrillingly perfect use of the frame as a compositional space to create movement and life. His genius is in the body language of the subjects, the mannequins and the real boys, which manages to be both naturalistic and enigmatic.

His is a work of Mona Lisa smiles.

In 1981, after a heavy snowfall was put to good Mannequinned use, Faucon stopped using mannequins. He sold them to a Japanese museum (his work inspired the Japanese TV series The Fuccons) and turned a page to a new chapter. Inspired, perhaps, by his successful re-creation of an inflight snowball fight, in the photograph 'Bataille de boules de niege' (1978), Faucon created the first of his 'Évolution probable du temps' (1981), an almost abstract series of painterly photographs in which the elements and the landscape took centre stage. We see a spectacular and real ball of fire in the sky above a field littered with children's clothes. Fire cascading down a hillside. Strange fiery lights shining out through the trees and within rooms. In some of
these photographs children are seen on the periphery, boys legs dangling into the frame in 'Les Jambes pendantes' (1981) and in 'La Terrasse' (1983) in which melting ice has created a floor painting of what could be the image of a man. A photograph of three boys around a dinner table on which an acrobat mannequin is performing a handstand on a cake, the only mannequin image in this sequence, is echoed by a splendid Dr Seuss like creation in which three strange hatted red stripped girls gasp as a giant fish prepares to eat the ball of fire roaring in the middle of their table.

This second great phase of Faucon's career contains the pointers to the concluding works - the richly imagined rooms of colour and love in 'Les Chambres' (1984-1988); sculptured words photographed within the landscape in the manner that would become 'Les Écritures' (1991) and which evolved into tiny images of whispered words written on close details along the contours of boy's bodies in Faucon's final work 'La Fin d'image' (1995). And there is 'Pour Agnes' (1996), a photograph of a handsome boy open-shirted, eyes closed -- sleeping, posing? dead? -- within a criss-cross of exquisite shadows. It's a photograph which reaches back to Faucon's early works whilst pulling him out of the abstract imaginings and into the reality of what is his greatest achievement - Les Idoles et les Sacrifices (1989).

In the gallery notes, Faucon wrote that he wanted to photograph beautiful bodies but because he couldn't photograph people, he chose instead to photograph 'gods'. His gods here are teenage boys bathed in a golden light. They are naked photographed from the hips up, fearlessly at ease like young Pierre and, alternately, they are looking to the centre right and to the centre left. In between each photograph of a boy or god is a landscape after the slaughter. There are rivers of blood, blood cascading down hillsides, blood spilling down rocks, blood rivulets weaving through green grass plains, snow-capped mountain tops splashed with the lifeblood not only of the subject but of the art and the artist himself.

Artists too be can innocents.