portrait: clippers

marya

In Homage To...

Patrick Tosani

(b Boissy l'Aillerie, France, 28 Sept 1954) - French photographer. While studying architecture in Paris (1973'9), Tosani produced his first experimental photographs, systematically exploring the possibilities of focus, depth of field and scale. These ideas were subsequently developed in series of photographs that focus on one object or figure, arranged in a studio.

His interest in the idea that photography can disrupt ordinary cognitive processes can be seen in a series of photographs taken of small figurines, mostly dancers or sportsmen, encased in ice. With Le Plongeur (1987; 1.2 Ãâ 1.7 mm, colour photograph; Paris, Gal. Liliane et Michel Durand-Dessert), a diver caught mid-plunge in a slowly melting block of ice, he demonstrated an interest in scales of magnitude and time. Other series made during the 1980s were concerned with elements of fire and rain, as well as sense perception: for example, the series Portraits (1984'5) made from highly blurred photographic portraits projected onto sheets of Braille.

Towards the end of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s his imagery became more organic, focusing especially on the human body. The series Ongles (1990) showed nervously bitten single fingernails, raw and tattered, enlarged greatly to abstract the image from its context. Tosani's method of producing a number of photographs of a single object, such as his taxonomies of heels and spoons, evoked the new objectivity of photography in the 1920s, especially that of Karl Blossfeldt, but stopped short of a theoretically-grounded encyclopedic endeavour.

In the series Géographie (1988), he showed simple enlarged images of round drumheads, worn and battered to give a lunar quality. Again, objective views of a simple object act as the springboard for a poetic intention. The disorientating capacity of photography to reproduce the world from unexpected viewpoints was explored in a series of human heads taken from exactly above, Heads (1992), and conversely of soles of single feet, taken exactly from below, Soles (1993). Both images hover against indeterminate bright white backgrounds, adding to the quality of abstraction.

Tosani has also produced works exploring seduction and repulsion: the series View (1993) consisted of monumental images of meat cutlets covered in metallic paint. He has said of his work: ââËBy slightly offsetting our ordinary vision of things, anonymous features of the world become mysterious' (Patrick Tosani, 2001). This approach can be seen again in a series of photographs he produced in 1999 of clothing soaked in glue to harden in a shape as if being worn, photographed from oblique angles. Pairs of trousers appear like masks, viewed through the waist, the leg holes forming the eyes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Patrick Tosani (exh. cat., essay by J.-F. Chevrier, Paris, Fond. N. de la Photographie, 1981)
Patrick Tosani (exh. cat., essay by J.-F. Chevrier, Paris, Mus. Mod. Ville Paris, 1984),
G. A. Tiberghien: ââËPatrick Tosani' (Paris, 1997)
Patrick Tosani (Paris, 2001)

Source::
JOHN-PAUL STONARD
é Oxford University Press 2006